Dark Horse
by IKnowThePiecesFit0114
Summary: No Girl on Fire in this one. No Boy With the Bread. Just Brutal, Bloody Cato. But he's burning slowly. For a Dark Horse.
1. Chapter 1

Cato Hadley was the most beloved victor in District 2. At the age of 18, he'd volunteered for the 70th Hunger Games, and had won in what his district considered the most honorable way; it had come down to him and the male tribute from 1, and they'd thrown their weapons to the side and battled it out with their bare hands for a solid thirteen minutes before Cato knocked the other boy out and broke his neck.

The games, which had taken place that year in marshy swamplands, had been the second shortest in Panem history, and Cato took down eight of his fellow tributes in four days, setting the record for most kills. Apart from the broken hand and internal bruising he'd sustained in the final showdown, he suffered only one other injury: a deep cut across his forehead when a gator mutt swiped him with one of its massive claws just before he shoved a spear through its skull after it killed Dani, his district partner.

He had been amped up beyond belief to enter his games, although he maintained a facade of reserved disdain, as though he were above this whole thing. He knew he'd win, the way he knew that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and so did his mentors and his classmates at the Academy. At his pre-games interview with Caesar, he won over the Capitol audience with his cold, self-assured demeanor. "I'm prepared. I'm vicious. I'm ready to go," he said with absolute certainty, and the crowd roared.

Cato had one vivid memory from his games. As he stood on his plate, assessing the cornucopia and the positions of his Career allies, he reminded himself why he was here. This was his destiny, it was what he had been born to do. He had trained for this since he was six years old. Once he was crowned Victor, all of his hard work, his blood and his sweat, would pay off and he'd be able to start living like a king. He'd have a mansion in Victors' Village, complete with Avoxes to serve him. He'd eat only the best food, drink only the finest liquor, and every night he'd sink himself balls deep into only the hottest pussy.

He calmed his breath and steadied his heartbeat to return his focus to the task at was a sword on the ground about 10 yards from him. This, he decided, would be the instrument with which he would achieve his goal.

Twenty-three other children were all that stood between Cato and what was to be the greatest moment of his entire life.

When it was time, he launched himself off of the plate and sprinted to the sword, shoving some girl about his age out of the way. He snatched it up and turned to the nearest tribute, a 12-year-old boy from District 3, who was crouched on the ground to retrieve a backpack of supplies. The little boy leapt up when Cato's shadow fell over him, and Cato sliced off his head as he had done to countless holographs during his years of training. But the holographs from the Academy didn't have big green eyes that bored into his with terror just before the blade struck home like this boy did. Blood didn't pour forth from their throats, coating his hands with warmth.

Cato had no memory of what happened during his games after that, although he watched himself kill four more tributes during the bloodbath at his post-games interview with Caesar six days later.

He watched himself bark orders to the other Careers, watched himself smile contemptuously as his allies mocked the pleas for mercy their victims had sobbed out before they were slaughtered.

He watched himself fuck Luxe, the female tribute from 1, against a willow tree during his second night in the arena while the other Careers slept, and then he watched himself hunt down and dispatch two other tributes with all the compunction of a horse swatting at a fly with its tail.

He watched himself walk away from Luxe's body without so much as a backward glance after Dani put an arrow through her heart when it was time for the Career alliance to break apart.

He watched as he and his final opponent pummeled each other with blows to the stomach and kidneys before he got the upperhand and snapped the other boy's neck.

He didn't remember doing any of it.

He did remember his post-games interview, but it was as if he stood behind his actual body for the duration of it, watching himself watch himself while he lounged in a tailored dark grey suit on the loveseat across from Caesar, one arm slung casually across the back of it, his ankle resting on his knee. The crowd adored him.

He got his mansion in Victors' Village, but he walked through the rooms blindly. He got his fine food and his top-shelf liquor, but he couldn't taste any of it. And as for the pussy…

Most nights he went out drinking with his buddies from his own training days. He usually didn't get wasted, just pleasantly buzzed. When he'd had enough, he'd look around whatever establishment they were patronizing to find all of the women staring at him with blatant lust. He'd survey them all briefly before choosing the hottest one, and he'd wink once and smirk at her before sauntering over to introduce himself. Some of them tried to be witty and clever as they flirted with him, and if he was in the mood Cato indulged them and bantered back, but he really wasn't into the bullshit of playing cat and mouse games; they'd had him at first eye-fuck.

He was rough and detached in bed (and against the wall, and on the floor), dispensing with kissing after about 30 seconds, but he wasn't entirely selfish. He knew how to get a girl off, and he made sure he did it before blowing his own load, because after all it was only fair.

He never brought them to his place, and he never stayed at theirs, leaving immediately after he had finished. Most of the time, he didn't even bother to learn their names.

He spent his time helping train the candidates at the Academy, and then he acted as a sort of apprentice and backup to Enobaria as she mentored the male tribute for the 71st games. District 2 lost that year, and the Victor was a tall, beautiful dark-skinned girl named Laila from 1. Cato, however, had done such a good job acquiring sponsors for his charge that they decided he was ready to take on full mentorship responsibility for Alec, the male volunteer for the 72nd Games. Alec was tall and blond like his young mentor, but while Cato gave off an aura of quiet, jaded contempt for everything and everyone, Alec was lewd and gregarious, with a maniacal gleam in his eyes. He won his games almost as easily as Cato had won his, and he laughed like a madman as he carried out his kills. Brutus and Lyme and the others clapped Cato on the back and called him a prodigy-he was the only mentor to ever produce a Victor on his first try. For the 73rd games, he mentored Thea, the female volunteer. She made it to the final six before she was killed. Lyme told him he'd done a great job anyway, reassured him that you won some and you lost some, and encouraged him to take it all in stride.

She didn't realize that he didn't care. He had acted smug when Alec won, and slightly disappointed when Thea lost, because that was how everyone had expected him to behave, but he didn't give two shits. Mentoring and teaching at the Academy was nothing more than his duty as a Victor, nothing more than something to fill his time.

He looked to all of Panem like a young man utterly satisfied with himself and his place in the world, but inside, he'd felt nothing for four years.

Well, almost nothing. Sometimes he relived his only memory from his bloodbath in his nightmares, and he awoke sick to his stomach with a feeling he couldn't name. On those nights, he couldn't fall back asleep, and so he would sit on the edge of his bed, a rope in his hand, tying a noose and then untying it, and then tying and untying it again, over and over in the dark.  
He didn't understand what it was that kept him from hanging himself, didn't realize that beneath the surface of his conscious thought was the latent knowledge that twenty-three dead children would never forgive him for wasting what had been taken from them four years ago.

Plutarch Heavensbee had perfected the art of schooling his features into amusement to hide the disgust he felt as Seneca Crane showed him a replay of the 73rd Hunger Games Victory Tour. For the most part there was nothing remarkable about it. The crowds that gathered at each of the stops acted much the same as they had in previous years. The citizens of District 1 cheered jubilantly because the victor-a hulking red-headed boy named Lars-was one of their own, while the people of District 2 regarded him with envious respect. The other districts exhibited varying degrees of forcibly feigned enthusiasm. Only the Capitol citizens seemed different this year, their applause for Lars just a bit more subdued than usual, their eyes dull with a hint of indifference.

Seneca paused the footage and turned to Heavensbee. "Do you see? The people of the Capitol are getting tired of watching tributes from 1 and 2 win year after year. It's been the same story for the last eight years, apart from Johanna Mason during the 69th. They want to see an underdog win."

"Are you suggesting we rig the games so someone from another district wins? I don't know that we can accomplish that with subtlety," Heavensbee said skeptically.

"Oh no, I'm not suggesting that we rig anything. I agree-it would be too obvious if we did, and we don't want to alienate our two most loyal districts by purposely killing off their tributes. But maybe we can do something to pique the Capitol citizens' interest and keep them satisfied until the excitement of the Quarter Quell."

"What did you have in mind?"

Seneca leaned forward eagerly. "Well tell me what you think of this." He spread his hands and paused for dramatic effect "Each tribute is mentored by a victor from another district." He sat back against his chair, looking pleased with himself, and evidently expecting Heavensbee to be impressed as well.

Heavensbee, who thought the idea rather underwhelming, nevertheless considered it for a minute. "In theory it's interesting," he said tactfully, "but in reality I think the mentors-at least the ones from 1 and 2-will just consider it a waste of time and continue working with the tributes from their own district secretly. They probably won't pay much attention to the tributes assigned to them...so the games won't really play out any differently in the end."

"Oh, I know that and you know that. But most of the Capitol citizens won't."

Heavensbee couldn't argue. But he wasn't so sure that President Snow would approve a change in rules during a non-Quell year. It was his private opinion that over the last few years the old man had lost touch even with the people of the Capitol, and Heavensbee had said as much to Alma Coin the last time he snuck off to District 13. "You may have a difficult time getting buy-in from the president," he said to Seneca.

"Yes, I've already thought about that. But I have an argument prepared. There aren't many mentors left from the outlying districts, and the ones still living are getting up there in age, with no one to replace them. Unless we can start rigging the games without people catching on, it may be only a few years until we have to resort to using mentors from 1 and 2 to work with tributes from other districts. This year, we may be able to ease the people of Panem into the idea. And the president has always respected your opinion, so if you'd lend me your support…"

Heavensbee had to admit it was a solid argument. He closed his eyes and thought for a minute. The slight rule change wouldn't hinder his and Coin's plans for revolution, and it may even help them, although Heavensbee wasn't sure how at this point. In any case, it couldn't hurt. He opened his eyes and smiled at Seneca. "Let's pitch it to him."

"Hera! Where are you, you little bitch!"

Hera panicked as she heard her father stumble into the house. _Why is he home so early?_ She slipped through the kitchen window, and sprinted into the woods. Years of fleeing from him had made her quick, agile and light-footed, and she scrambled up into a nearby tree with stealthy ease. She heard the crunch of his boots on the ground, and ducked into the cover of the foliage, careful not to make a sound or rustle the branches.

"…ungrateful little whore…" she could hear him muttering. She peered down at him through the leaves to gauge how drunk he was. On a scale of 1 to 10, he appeared to be at about a 7. He staggered around for a few more minutes before giving up and returning to the house. Hera settled into a more comfortable position. Three more drinks or so and he'd pass out for the night.

She couldn't remember a time when her father hadn't been drunk and abusive, but things had gone from bad to worse when Hera's mother died of fever ten years ago, leaving her eight-year-old daughter the sole target of his anger. She had tried hiding in closets and under beds, but he'd inevitably find her, and beat her even more harshly to punish her for the inconvenience of having to hunt for her. Mostly he used his fists and his feet, but sometimes he'd yank his belt off and whip her across the back and shoulder blades as hard as he could until his rage was spent.

Then one day when she was nine, she and her best friend Uma climbed a tree to pick the first ripe pears of the season, and as they sat in the branches enjoying the early fall breeze, it occurred to her what an excellent hiding place this would be.

If her father was only kind of drunk as opposed to completely wasted he was still decently quick, and she'd have to zigzag through the trees for a hundred yards or so to lose him before selecting one to scale, but her stealth combined with his intoxication would force him to give up his chase within a couple of minutes. A few times a month he still managed to catch her before she could get out of the house, and then she'd have bruised ribs and a split lip, but if she made it to the woods she was golden. She'd hide out for a few hours, making a meal out of apples and the earthy groundnuts she foraged for beneath the fallen leaves, and then return to the house to find him passed out on the couch, a bottle of liquor next to him. By the time he woke up the next morning, he either didn't remember the events of the previous evening or was too hungover to acknowledge her presence before he headed off to work at the paper processing plant.

When she was fifteen and puberty hit, the look in her father's eye took on a lecherous cast, inciting a new kind of panic in Hera. He'd press against her and grope around clumsily, but thankfully, his drunkenness meant he could never quite get hard enough to accomplish his goal of deflowering his daughter. Although it would infuriate him and result in especially cruel beatings, Hera preferred the extra blows to the idea of being raped.

No one, not even Uma, knew that she had resorted to hiding from her father in the trees. Telling people would have meant acknowledging the abuse, and Hera was too proud to do that. Oh, everyone knew about her situation, but it was one of those things you didn't talk about, like sex or the cruelties of the Capitol. And Hera held her head high and refused to let on that her body was perpetually sore, so the townspeople pretended they didn't see the bruises on her cheeks.

She didn't mind spending so many hours in the forest. She liked the smell of the damp soil and the sound of cicadas singing in the summer. She liked the way the frost coated the leaves like sugar when the cold started to set in. She liked the inky look of the bare branches against the purple gloom of twilight in the winter. The forest had become her home.

She didn't stay in the trees for long tonight, though. It looked like rain, and Hera wasn't in the mood to get drenched, so she jumped down from her perch and headed over to Uma's house.

"What are you gonna wear tomorrow?" Uma asked, removing the darts from the bullseye and handing them to her.

"Hadn't thought about it." Bullseye. Bullseye. Bullseye. The two girls had found the strange looking circle in Uma's dad's shed when they were little, and asked him what it was. He explained that it was a dartboard, back from before the war, when Panem was known as the United States. And then he fished out a set of three darts and showed them how to use it. Over the years the girls had gotten so good they didn't even compete with one another or keep score anymore. There was no point, since they hit the bullseye nine times out of ten. But they still sat around and tossed the darts for old times' sake, and Hera loved the familiar comfort of the repetitive action.

"Well I think you should wear your purple dress. You look so cute in it."

Hera rolled her eyes. "I don't care about looking cute for reaping day."

"Well not for the actual reaping, but for afterwards!"

Hera just looked at her best friend in confusion.

Uma sighed with exasperation. "You're an idiot. Dean's gonna ask you to marry him tomorrow, once you make it through your last reaping. Lucky girl. He's so hot!"

Hera felt her mouth drop open and her face grow warm. "No, it's not like that!...He doesn't think of me like that. I don't think of him like that….I mean we've never even kissed….he's too old for me."

Uma raised her eyebrows and turned back to the dartboard. "Okay. Whatever you say."

The next morning, Hera was over to Dean Callahan's house at the crack of dawn, heating bathwater for Cole, Dean's 10-year-old son. It was going to be a long morning. She needed to get four children bathed, dressed, and fed, and then she had to get herself ready for the reaping. And she needed to keep poor Tara, who was 12 and eligible for the first time, calm.

Dean's wife had died eight months ago while giving birth to their last child, a baby girl named Mia. Dean was left with four children to raise on his own, but he didn't know how to cook a decent meal, and even if he'd been able to, he was exhausted by the time he got home each evening from working with his logging crew all day. He'd never really spoken to Hera, but he lived two doors down from her, and about a week after his wife's funeral, he stopped her as she passed his house on the way home from school, and asked her if she'd be willing to drop out and look after the baby and keep house for him.

Hera didn't really see the point in continuing with school. She was in her last year, and she'd always figured she'd just go to work in one of the factories once she was done. She could read and write and do basic math...what else did she need to learn? She'd miss Uma, but they could hang out during the evenings. Dean's three older children-Tara, Cole, and 7-year-old son Reese-seemed well-behaved and Dean himself was reserved and polite. He'd offered her a small wage, but a decent one, and three meals a day. So she said yes.

Every weekday for the last eight months, Hera had shown up first thing in the morning to make breakfast and get the three older children ready for school. She'd spend the day cooking and cleaning while she watched Mia, and then she'd stay for the better part of the evening, serving and eating supper with them, washing up the dishes, and helping the kids with their homework. Some nights she even put them to bed. She didn't spend as much time in the trees now, and sometimes she missed it, but she still retreated to the forest on the weekends.

Her father had no idea that she had dropped out of school. He left before Hera every morning, and after work he went to the bar and drank until at least nine o'clock. Her neighbors, sympathetic and loyal, kept her secret, knowing that her father would only squander her wages on liquor if he knew.

She had a hard time looking Dean in the face this morning after her conversation with Uma the night before. She knew that people had started to talk about the two of them, but she'd always rolled her eyes and dismissed the comments. At 31, Dean was thirteen years older than Hera, and although he'd always treated her with respect, he'd never made a pass at her-he probably wasn't interested in her in that way, and even if he was, he was too polite to risk making her uncomfortable.

But Uma wasn't exaggerating when she said he was hot. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with lean muscles from logging all day. His skin was tan and rough from working outside, and Hera liked the way the corners of his gray eyes crinkled when he smiled. He wore his dark brown hair in a small knot at the back of his head, and his teeth gleamed milky white against the scruff of his beard.

Cole had finished his bath by the time Hera dished up oatmeal with honey and cherries for breakfast. "Alright, little man," she said to Reese, ruffling his hair affectionately. "You're up as soon as you're done eating." Then she turned her attention to spoon-feeding Mia, playing a game of peekaboo in between bites. This made the baby girl squeal with delight, and Hera loved the sound. It was infectious and she found herself unable to stifle a giggle of her own. Mia pressed the fingers of one hand, sticky with honey, to Hera's lips, and she caught them in her mouth briefly, and then released them with a pop of her lips, making Mia squeal again. _This is a good day_ , she thought to herself as she licked the traces of honey left behind by Mia from her lips. _Honey, and cherries and the sound of a baby's laughter._ She looked up to find Dean gazing at her with warmth in his eyes.

 _Maybe Uma's right_ , she thought to herself. _No, I'm just imagining it. He's not looking at me any differently than he normally does._

As she put away the breakfast dishes, she stood on tiptoe, straining to replace the honey pot on a high shelf, where little fingers greedy for sugar wouldn't be able to reach it, when she felt Dean come up behind her. "Here," he said quietly, taking it from her. "Let me do that for you." He smelled like cedar and soap and leather.

After she had gotten the three younger ones ready, she helped Tara get dressed. The little girl was shaking with fright, so Hera sat her down on her lap and smoothed her hair. "Don't worry, honey, your name is only in once. They won't pick you."

"But what if they do?" she whispered.

"They won't," Hera told her firmly. "Now, let's get your hair braided." She combed through Tara's hair gently, humming softly to soothe her. She looked up to see Dean's eyes on her again, and this time there was no mistaking the heat that emanated from them. Hera felt herself blush, and she dropped her gaze.

As she finished braiding Tara's hair, she thought about what Uma had said last night. Suppose Dean did ask her to marry him. What would she say? Looking after his children had awakened a fierce maternal instinct that she'd had no idea she possessed. She adored all of them, and they treated her as though she were their mother, proudly displaying their homework to her when they did well at school and seeking her out for comfort when they scraped themselves while playing. She loved the way Mia's face lit up at the sight of her, loved the feel of the baby in her arms. She didn't know Dean well and she certainly didn't love him, but he was handsome and respectful and appreciative of her help. He worked hard and he loved his family. She heard boyish laughter and looked up from Tara's hair to see Dean and Cole play-wrestling. "You'll wrinkle your shirt," she admonished Cole, trying to make her voice sound stern, but she couldn't help but smile.

 _Yes. I'll say yes if he asks._


	2. Chapter 2

Her father had left for the bar to by the time she returned to her house to get ready. She scrubbed herself thoroughly and combed her clean, wet hair out by the fire until it was silky. She put on the dark purple dress that Uma had told her to wear. Outside, the sky was a gloomy gray and the wind was chilly, so she pulled on her brown leather boots and wrapped an oversized, cream wool cardigan around herself, and then she headed back over to collect Tara and take her to the square. She wasn't nervous for herself or the little girl. Neither of them had had to take tesserae; their chances of being chosen were slim.

When they arrived at the square, Hera stood beside Uma in the section reserved for the eighteen-year-old girls. She didn't know where her father was-or if he was even there, but it didn't bother her. What did bother her was that she couldn't see Tara from all the way back there. But to her right, she could see Dean on the edge of the crowd holding Mia, with his two boys flanking him. She wondered if she'd be standing beside him next year, with Mia on her hip and a hand on Reese's head.

Then the District 7 escort, Trini Sweetwater, traipsed to the front of the stage in a hideous pea-green dress and a white wig. They all watched the stupid Capitol video, and then it was time to read the names, and it was all going to be over soon, and Hera was getting butterflies in her stomach because _what if Dean asks me to marry him?_ she thought.

And then "Tara Callahan," said Trini in her saccharine voice.

Hera felt time suspend itself as she processed what she'd just heard, felt her blood stop moving in her veins, even as she heard her pulse beat against her eardrums. _No. No no no_. She had _promised_ Tara that her name wouldn't be called. She glanced to her right. Dean stood in shock, Cole and Reese were starting to cry. And then she saw the back of Tara's head as the Peacekeepers took hold of her arms to escort her onstage and suddenly time started to move too quickly.

Hera didn't think, she just moved, shoving her way past the other girls to the center aisle.

"No!" she shouted. "I'll go. Take me." She felt everyone turn to look at her, and then two Peacekeepers materialized on either side of her, each taking an arm to whisk her to the front of the crowd. And she was onstage, saying "Hera Greenleaf" into the microphone. She had no idea who they called from the boys' section. Her brain registered that he was younger than her, short and skinny, with dark hair, but she couldn't focus enough to remember his name or the features of his face.

She didn't even hear Trini announce that there had been a slight rule change this year, and that the tributes for the 74th Annual Hunger Games would be mentored by victors from another district.

Within seconds the Peacekeepers were escorting her inside and she found herself deposited in the fanciest room she'd ever been in, but she didn't stop to take it in as she thought about what she'd just done. She had committed herself to die. But what choice did she have? She could have said nothing, and watched a little girl she'd come to think of almost as a daughter be slaughtered on live television. She couldn't have faced herself, couldn't have accepted a proposal from Dean-if in fact, he'd meant to propose-if she'd done that. She would have drowned in her own guilt. And who would miss her when she was gone? Certainly not her father. Yes, the Callahan children would miss her, but they would have missed Tara more. Uma...Uma would be fine, she had a loving family, she had other friends. This was for the best.

Uma appeared first, bawling her eyes out. "It's ok, it's ok," Hera said over and over again, rubbing her back as they hugged. She pulled back to give her best friend a tiny smile. "You'll be done with school in a couple of weeks and then you can go work for Dean," she said, trying her best to comfort Uma. It only made her friend cry harder as the Peacekeepers came to escort her out of the room.

The Callahan family came next, tears on the three older children's cheeks and snot running down their noses. She threw her arms around the three of them, gathering them to herself. "You silly things," she said with a brave face. "Don't you know I've survived my father all these years? I'll survive the Games." It was the sweetest lie she'd ever told and she didn't feel one bit guilty for it. It was also the first time she'd acknowledged her father's abuse out loud. But the children weren't blind; they'd seen her bruises. They stifled their tears, determined to match her stoicism.

Dean shooed them from the room and turned to face her, holding Mia in his arms. Hera had lost her shyness now that she had sentenced herself to death, and she looked him boldly in the face, holding out her hands to take Mia on her hip one last time. "I'll miss you baby girl," she cooed, and kissed the top of her head. When she looked back at Dean he had tears in his eyes. "Uma Graham is done with school in a couple of weeks," she told him. "She can take my place."

He stared at her in disbelief. "You've sacrificed yourself for my daughter."

Hera shrugged. "I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd just stood there."

Dean just stared at her. Then he leaned forward and cupped her face in his hands before placing a kiss, at once sweet and rough, on her lips. And then the Peacekeepers opened the door and announced that his time was up. She pulled back and handed Mia to him, and she smiled wistfully with her mouth, but she could tell that it didn't reach her eyes. He stared at her as they pulled him backwards from the room, stared at her until they shut the door.

Alec was bouncing off the walls with excitement. He was going to be a mentor this year for the first time, and any minute now the cameras would go live, and it would be time for his tribute, Clay, to volunteer.

All of the District 2 mentors were gathered in a room in the Justice Center, waiting for Clay and Clove, the female tribute, to join them after the reaping. Brutus would be responsible for mentoring Clove, a tiny dark-haired girl with narrow eyes and a sour expression.

They were all surprised when the door opened, and Paris, the escort for 2, entered the room, flanked by two Peacekeepers.

"Shouldn't you be going onstage any second?" Lyme asked him.

"I'm told there's been a slight rule change this year," Paris looked perturbed, and the Peacekeeper on his left handed him a thick glossy envelope sealed with Seneca Crane's monogram.

"Rule change?" Brutus asked, and, except for Cato, who just took another sip of his drink, they all leaned forward in concerned anticipation as Paris opened the envelope and began to read Crane's message.

"On behalf of our august leader, President Snow, I am excited to announce that this year each tribute will be mentored by a Victor from another district. The stylists, prep teams, and mentors of District 2 will have the honor of working with the tributes from District 7 for the 74th Annual Games, while the District 2 tributes will train under District 9. I'm sure you will find the change to be a refreshing one. Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor, Seneca Crane."

They all sat in stunned silence for a few seconds, before Enobaria spoke up. "This is a joke right?" Paris looked to the Peacekeepers for an answer, but they shook their heads, serious as ever. "No ma'am," they said in unison.

"What the-?! This is bullshit!" Alec exclaimed. "Brutus, you have to call that bastard Crane and tell him we refuse to mentor any other tributes!"

"First of all," Brutus said, "one does not simply tell the head gamemaker-or any gamemaker for that matter-what to do. And secondly, I'm not wasting my time on those little runts from 7. Cato gets to do the honors along with you this year."

"Why do _I_ have to?" Cato asked, mildly annoyed.

"Because seniority rules," Brutus said with finality, and he turned on his heel and left the room.

The two of them watched the District 7 reaping in sullen resignation.

The boy, Julian, was fourteen and scrawny, and he blubbered as the Peacekeepers shoved him up the steps and into the escort's clutches. He wouldn't make it through the bloodbath.

The girl wouldn't, either. Anyone who volunteered simply for the sake of saving another person's life was too soft. And she was a tiny little thing, who wrapped her ill-fitting sweater around herself tightly and shivered as the wind whipped her fine hair into her face. She stood onstage, devoid of expression, and when she spoke her name—Hera something-or-other—into the microphone, her voice sounded hollow. _She's in shock_ , Cato thought.

"Do you want the boy or the girl?" Alec asked him.

"Either one. Doesn't matter to me," Cato said.

"Well I want the boy. Girls from the outlying districts are worthless."

"I'm pretty sure they're both gonna be slaughtered in the first hour, but fine, whatever." Cato had no intention of actually training this girl. She didn't have a chance, so why bother?

Hera had never seen such luxury. The walls and furnishings of the train compartment were upholstered in dark green velvet. There were thick carpets on the floors and the surfaces of the tables and counters were inlaid with patterns of different lacquered woods-cherry and maple and mahogany. Crystal chandeliers lit the compartment, and a mouthwatering variety of fruits, cheeses and pastries was spread across one of the counters.

Trini sat them down in the plush chairs and gave them each a cup of tea, then busied herself with fixing plates for them. Some of Hera's shock had worn off, and she turned to her male counterpart to ask him his name and age. "Julian," he whispered to her, looking bewildered. "I'm fourteen."

"Hera, eighteen," she whispered back and squeezed his hand comfortingly.

"Where's Johanna?" she asked Trini, as the escort handed them each a plate.

"She'll be traveling to the Capitol on another train."

"Why?"

"Well, there's no sense in her traveling with us since she'll be working with the District 10 tributes."

"Huh? Why is she doing that?"

"Didn't you hear the announcement at the reaping?" Hera looked at her blankly. "They're switching it up. The tributes this year are working with mentors from other districts. You two will be working with District 2."

"Which one from District 2?" Hera asked. There was the woman with the sharp teeth, Enobaria, and the bald one, Brutus. The ruthless quiet one that all the girls fawned over, Cato. Alec, the winner from two years ago with a sick psychotic laugh. She tried to run through all of them in her head, but she lost track; there had to be at least a dozen of them still living, probably more like fifteen, although most of the older ones had retired from mentoring. She shivered involuntarily. They were all intimidating.

"I'm not sure, dear. We'll find out once we arrive. But I'm sure you'll each get your own," Trini said. Of course they would. Districts that had more than one sane, living victor had that luxury, unlike 7.

"Do you think we'll train together?" Julian asked her a bit later.

"I don't know. Our mentors will probably decide that for us. That and whether or not we'll work together during the games. But listen, no matter what, I won't kill you." The words sounded so strange coming out of her mouth.

"I won't kill you either," he said to her, managing to give her a weak smile.

Neither of them asked what they would do if they made it to the final two, because they both knew it would never happen.

"Hmmm, surely they're here by now," Trini frowned as she looked out at the platform. She was waiting for the District 2 mentors to board the train and greet Hera and Julian before they disembarked and headed into the Training Center to prepare for the Tribute Parade.

Julian peeked through the curtains at the crowd that had gathered in front of the platform to cheer the arrival of each new pair of tributes.

"Ma'am, we can't wait any longer," said a Peacekeeper, sticking his head into the compartment. "The next train will be arriving in less than 10 minutes."

Trini sighed frustratedly and ushered her tributes to the door. "Alright my dears, smile and wave for the crowds." And then she placed a hand on each of their backs and pushed them gently out the door and onto the platform. Julian waved weakly, but was too overwhelmed to smile. Hera didn't feel like waving and the attention made her nervous, so she fixed her eyes just above the crowd and waited for it to be over with.

"Oh thank god. Something I can work with," were the first words out of her stylist's mouth. His name was Gianni and he typically worked with the female tribute from District 2. "I wasn't sure what was under that monstrosity of a cardigan you had on at your reaping."

"Just please nothing that shows my back," she requested. "I have some scars there that I'm pretty self-conscious about."

Gianni narrowed his eyes at her and reached towards the back of her shirt. "May I look?" he asked.

She hesitated, but he was going to see them anyway at some point. So she nodded, and he hissed when he saw the decade's worth of marks her father's abuse had left on her skin, but he promised he'd honor her request.

"Do you know who's going to mentor me?" she asked.

"Cato Hadley has been assigned to you," he said cheerfully, but it sounded unnatural and strained, as if there was something he wasn't saying. She frowned and pictured Cato. All of the women of the Capitol were obsessed with him, and back home most of the girls thought he was hot too. Hera had seen him on tv, and in real life from a distance during his Victory Tour stop in 7, and she had to admit he was attractive, tall and built and blond. But he seemed so cold and ruthless. She remembered his games, remembered how his expression had remained detached and neutral as he ran other children through with his sword. That anyone could so calmly end the life of another...She shivered. She was not looking forward to meeting him.

"And what about Julian?" she asked.

"Alec," Gianni said.

 _Poor Julian_. She'd rather deal with Cato's iciness than that sick son of a bitch and his crazy, high-pitched laugh.

It was while her prep team was in the middle of de-fuzzing her entire body that she overheard Gianni and Trini as they whispered to each other in the corner, and she understood Gianni's strange tone when he had told her that Cato would be her mentor.

"He's refusing to train her. He says it's a waste of his time because she's just gonna get killed," she heard Gianni say quietly "And of course, when Alec found out, he immediately followed suit and said the same thing about the boy."

"Well I won't stand for it," Trini huffed. "I'm going to go to Seneca."

"No, don't. Trust me, I've worked with both of them. You'll only make Cato resentful, and Alec, well, god knows what that psycho will do. Calm down, let me see if I can persuade the two of them," Gianni said, but he sounded doubtful.

Although it hadn't occurred to Hera that Cato would refuse to work with her, once she heard the words it made so much sense given his reputation and demeanor, that she wasn't shocked. The news didn't upset her though. If anything she was relieved.

They put her in a filmy, body-skimming gown embroidered with delicate, sparkling tree branches in shades of gold, olive and chocolate, and they piled her light brown hair on top of her head and wove tiny, dusty green leaves through it. They smudged a rich brown liner into her lashes and put so much fine gold glitter on her lids and cheekbones that some of the pieces got in her eyes, irritating them to no end, and it took all of Hera's self-control not to rub them furiously with the heels of her hands.

But her costume wasn't humiliating like the tacky cowgirl outfit poor District 10 had to wear ( _and what the hell was that on the District 6 tributes' heads?_ ), and it could have been a lot worse, so she sighed and endured their manhandling without complaint.

As the chariot made its way past the audience, Hera didn't know how to respond to the sea of faces and cacophony of cheers. She fixed her eyes on the horizon and pretended that the cool air rushing over her cheeks and shoulders was a pine-scented breeze rustling through her hair as she ran through the forest.

Cato, who hadn't bothered to meet his tribute yet, sat in the box reserved for previous victors, glass of scotch in hand, and decided he should at least spare a glance for the District 7 chariot and its occupants. His gaze skimmed past Julian, but he froze when he saw Hera, and he found he couldn't look away from her. He thought she held herself like a queen, aloof and dignified, with a faraway look in her eyes. Brutus shook him out of his stupor with an elbow to his ribs. "Well at least they look respectable." he commented. Cato shoved his impression of Hera to the back of his mind. "Looking respectable doesn't count for shit in the arena," he said flatly.


	3. Chapter 3

"Now, this is where you'll be staying for the next three months," Trini said as they entered the front door of the apartment assigned to the District 7 female. Like the train, it was plush and sleek, with marble floors and velvety furnishings, but it felt a little cold to her. She squealed with delight, however, when she peeked into her bedroom and realized that she had her own bathroom, with a shower, a real shower. There was a bedroom for Trini, who always stayed with the female tribute, and one for her mentor.

"Will Johanna stay here?" Hera asked hopefully, although she already knew the answer.

"No, the mentors have been told they must stay with their assigned tributes."

"You don't think Cato will actually stay here, do you, since he's not going to train me?" Trini looked horrified at her question. "I heard you and Gianni talking about it," Hera said gently. "You don't have to pretend."

Trini sighed. "No, he'll stay here for the sake of appearance. Anyway, his usual room is currently occupied by the District 9 mentor. Come, on, let me show you your training complex. It's just across the hall. Everything is state-of-the-art, and you don't have to share it with anyone."

Hera couldn't believe how big it was. The facility consisted of a handful of rooms surrounded by a track an eighth of a mile around. There was a sparring room with padded walls and mats on the floor for practicing hand-to-hand combat. There was a huge room with walls lined with weapons—machetes, bows and arrows, swords, spears, and terrifying-looking instruments she'd never seen before. It also had what looked like a small tv screen embedded in the wall, but no targets anywhere, which Hera found strange. There was a weight room, as well. Hera's favorite aspect of the training facility was the climbing wall at one end of the track.

"Does Julian have one like this?" she asked.

"Mm-hm. Each tribute has their own."

By the time they walked back across the hall to the apartment, it was getting late, so Hera headed to her room. But she couldn't quiet her mind enough to fall asleep. She wondered what Uma was doing, wondered what the Callahan family-which had almost become her family-was doing. When her thoughts turned to speculating on how she would be killed in the arena, she decided she couldn't lay there anymore; she slipped back into the training facility. She glanced at the climbing wall longingly, but she thought she should explore something new. She wandered into the weapons room and surveyed her options. Probably best to start small, she decided, choosing a set of ten delicate but wicked-looking knives. Maybe throwing knives wouldn't be all that different from throwing darts. But where was she supposed to throw it? There weren't any targets.

The only other thing in the room was the screen in the wall. There were no power buttons like her tv at home had, so she touched the screen lightly with the tip of her finger. It immediately fired itself up and asked her to choose a weapon. At first Hera just stood there, awed by the technology in front of her, and then she tentatively touched the icon that matched the knives in her hand. Then it asked her if she wanted to watch a training video or select a target. _Select a target_. Did she want a fixed or moving target? _Fixed, let's not get ahead of ourselves_. And what size target? _Medium-sized human_. The screen didn't ask her any more questions. Instead, the word "Processing" flashed across the screen. What did that mean? What would happen now?

She caught a flash of light in her peripheral vision, and turned to see a glowing green holograph of a featureless human being at the far end of the training room. Hera's mouth fell open with amazement, and she walked towards the target until she was about an arm's length away from it. Then she took one of the knives, reached out, and stabbed it where she thought its heart should be.

"Fatal strike," said a robotic voice.

 _Huh._ Hera returned to the screen, wondering how to get back to the place that offered up the training video. There was an icon in the bottom left-hand corner that said "Back." She tapped it until it took her to the screen she wanted, and then she selected the training video. First it showed her the proper stance, and then it taught her how to hold the knife and balance its weight in her hand, and she practiced both of these concepts. Then it moved on to proper throwing technique, which Hera tried out without a knife in her hand. Then it was onto aiming.

When she'd gotten through the section on aim, Hera picked up all ten knives and walked back over to the holograph, positioning herself about eight feet away from it. Her first throw caught it in the shoulder, and the mysterious voice informed her that while she'd managed to injure it, she needed to throw with more force. Hera considered this for a bit, and then decided that she'd worry about force later. For now, she would focus on one microskill at a time. She concentrated on perfecting the flick of her wrist, ignoring the voice's repeated assertions that more force was needed for her to be lethal, and was pleased with herself when she was able to strike the holograph about 90% of the time, although her aim wasn't perfect, and most of them weren't fatal. Hera continued to practice until the repetitive motion soothed her mind enough that she began to grow tired.

The next morning, Hera thought to herself that she had never had such a delicious breakfast. She was used to toast or oatmeal back in District 7, but here she had food she'd only read about in books: pancakes with maple syrup, smoky bacon, and freshly squeezed orange juice. She closed her eyes as she bit into a piece of cantaloupe and thought that maybe, just maybe, it was worth dying in the arena if she got to have food like this for the next couple of months. Trini smiled at her and refilled her plate.

Cato was nowhere to be found but considering the discussion she'd overhead between Gianni and Trini, it didn't shock her. She poured herself a second cup of coffee and flipped through the channels of the Capitol tv. Trini, however, clenched her teeth and glanced repeatedly at Cato's bedroom door.

He appeared around 11am, fixed himself a plate, and sat down to tuck into it without acknowledging Hera's presence. Trini glared at him murderously, but Hera had determined that if he was going to ignore her, she'd ignore him too, so she continued to watch tv, conquering the urge to sneak a peek at him. She was relieved that he had decided not to train her, but she did hope he'd at least give her a few pieces of advice to keep her from suffering too much. When he was finished he left the table and returned to his room, ignoring Trini's exasperated sigh. Hera heard the shower running, and nonchalantly flipped through a fashion magazine on the coffee table, marveling at the garish outfits on the pages.

He emerged from his room fifteen minutes later. Hera thought maybe he would at least say something to her now, but he walked past her as she sat on the couch and headed towards the door. This was too much for Trini, who marched up to him, hands on her hips, and said "So tell me, are you planning to ignore your tribute for the entire three months?"

Cato paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned towards Trini slowly. He raked his eyes up and down her tacky outfit and overly made-up face with derision before turning to face Hera. She let herself look at him for the first time, and considered it a miracle that she managed to keep her expression neutral, because _jesus christ he was beautiful_. He was at least as tall as Dean, maybe even an inch or so taller, and bigger in real life than he appeared on tv, all of it pure muscle. He wore a t shirt, and although she was too proud to to look away from his face to check out his body, she could see from the corners of her eyes that his biceps were solid and sculpted. His gray-blue eyes were sharp and glacial, his features somehow fine and masculine at the same time. He had smooth skin except for his light-colored scruff and the scar that ran through his eyebrow and up his forehead, which he'd earned during his time in the arena. He kept his dark blond hair cropped close to his head on the sides and in the back, but the front and top of it were longer, and rose up in unruly tufts.

"You know you're gonna die right? Probably in the bloodbath," he said to her with jaded insouciance.

"I know," she said, quietly and without emotion. "I knew I was dead the moment I volunteered." Her dark eyes were steady as they met his cynical gaze, and he was taken aback by their color-a deep blue-green like the sea, which he found strange considering she hailed from woodlands. He studied her for a moment. Her light brown hair was fine, straight and silky in texture. She had a delicate bone structure with high cheekbones and her skin had the clear, luminescent quality of child's. She was small, at least a foot shorter than him, and slender.

Her calm acceptance of her situation unnerved him. He had expected her to burst into tears or start shaking with fear like most people would have. He wouldn't even have been surprised if she had reacted with anger. But it had never occurred to him that someone could be so serene at the prospect of certain death in the games. Cato stared at her as if she wasn't quite right in the head. She shrugged. "It is what it is, " she said. "What good will it do me to get all worked up?"

"Well good. Then we can agree it's a waste of both my time and yours for me to train you," he said.

"Maybe," she said. "But wouldn't you be embarrassed if I was the first to be killed? Maybe we could just aim for me to make it past the bloodbath."

"If you want to do that you should probably just avoid the cornucopia altogether and focus on surviving in the wild."

She looked at him expectantly. He looked back. "So?" she finally said. "How do I survive in the wild?"

He sighed and stalked over to the dining room table, looking at his watch impatiently. "Bring me a piece of paper and a pen," he said with some annoyance. Hera complied and Cato spent the next few minutes making a list of survival topics for her to research. Trini, appeased for the time being, left to go socialize with some of the other escorts. When Cato was finished he stood up and started towards the door, leaving the list on the table. "Look that shit up in the database," he said over his shoulder. Hera scanned the list, and turned to ask him what a database was, but he had already left.

"What the fuck is a database?" she said, turning to the Avox who was clearing the breakfast dishes from the table. She had meant it rhetorically, but the girl smiled at her sympathetically and abandoned her task, beckoning her to the desk in the corner of the living room, which held a small screen like the one from the weapons room.

The Avox silently showed her how to search the database for different articles and tutorials, and it proved to be as intuitive as the screen in the weapons room, so after a few minutes, Hera thanked her and settled down to research water purification.

Over the next two weeks, Cato settled into a daily routine. He'd wake up late, and wander out to the dining room for coffee and a big breakfast. Well, brunch, really. After his shower he'd go down to the second floor to hang out with the other District 2 mentors and watch Clay train. They had made it clear to the elderly District 9 victor who had been assigned to mentor the tributes from 2 that his presence was both unnecessary and unwelcome, and so he was nowhere to be found. After a few hours, Cato would take the elevator to the basement to work out in the facility reserved for former victors, and then he'd return to his room to shower again before heading out to eat dinner, go bar hopping, and get laid. He rarely returned to the training center before 1am. He had barely seen Hera since that first morning when he'd made her the list of topics to research, and when they were in the same room at the same time, the two simply nodded at each other in acknowledgement.

Hera had also settled into a daily routine. She rose with the sun and researched survival skills at the database while she ate her breakfast. She had quickly exhausted the list that Cato had given her, so she had moved on to studying more advanced survival topics. After a couple of hours, she'd cross the hall to the training facility to practice sprinting, climbing, and long-distance running. She'd eat lunch and then spent her afternoon and early evening practicing her knife throwing. Around 7pm, she'd return to the apartment to shower and eat dinner. At this point, she was usually so tired that she'd go straight to bed, but if she still had energy left, she'd go back to playing with her knives.

It had almost become an obsession. After a few days, she had progressed from fixed to moving targets, and after she'd been in the Capitol a week and a half, she had reached the point where she could land a fatal shot on a moving target from 15 feet away nine times out of ten. She was beginning to practice with two moving targets at a time.

It wasn't that she had deluded herself into thinking she stood a chance at surviving the games, but really, what else was she going to do with her time other than train? If she just sat idly in the apartment, she'd go insane thinking about her imminent death and how much she missed the woods and how she'd never see Uma or Tara or Mia again. And throwing the knives soothed her mind the way throwing darts had back in 7.

One day, after Hera had been in the Capitol a little over a week, Johanna Mason walked in on her as she sunk a knife through a moving target's left eye. "Holy shit, that's impressive," were the victor's first words. "Cato know about this?"

"No." Hera shook her head.

"Does Julian know?"

"No. No one knows."

"Good. Keep it that way." Johanna eyed her approvingly. "That was really brave what you did, you know, volunteering to take that little girl's place. Suicidal. But brave. You'll definitely outlast Julian."

"Have you seen him?" Hera asked.

"Yeah. Just before I came over here. He told me that so far you two haven't trained together. Smart. It's better not to get attached, especially since, from the looks of it, he's not gonna last long."

Hera cringed a little. "Look, I know you're supposed to be mentoring 10, but is there some way you can help him?"

"That's why I'm here. No one is actually paying attention to what's going on, and a lot of the mentors have been working with the tributes from their own district. I'm gonna start training you two."

 _So that's where Cato spends his time. Makes sense_. "Don't worry about me. I'm not planning on going home anyway. But thank you."

Johanna seemed hesitant, but she agreed. "Alright. It looks like you're doing a good job mentoring yourself anyway. But let me know if you change your mind."


	4. Chapter 4

Fifteen days after the tribute parade, Cato decided he needed a break from partying. He'd had more liquor than usual the night before and now he was paying for it with a vicious hangover. Even the soft footsteps of the Avox who served his brunch amplified the pounding of his head, and he would have thrown something at her if he hadn't thought the jarring motion would make him vomit. He forced himself to swallow a piece of dry toast and a few spoonfuls of scrambled eggs, along with several glasses of water, called Brutus to tell him he was too hungover to come down to watch Clay train or go out that night, and then he went back to bed. When he awoke, it was late afternoon, almost evening.

"Well, look who it is," Trini said with irritation. "Have you finally decided to train your tribute or is she just going to have to continue training herself?"

 _Training herself?_ This should be good, at the very least entertaining…something to laugh about with Brutus and Alec and Clay. He grunted at Trini and walked out of the apartment and across the hall to the training complex.

"Fatal strike," he heard the mechanical voice from the weapons room say. It stopped him in his tracks. "Fatal strike, fatal strike." it said again, about 5 seconds later. He peeked through the doorway, and there was his tribute, tossing knives at holographs as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "Fata-fatal strike," the voice said as Hera threw knives at two moving targets so quickly that the voice couldn't even finish announcing the first kill before it interrupted itself to declare the second. Cato couldn't believe it; she'd hit both targets in their left eyes.

He stepped further into the room, and she turned towards him with astonishing speed and agility, and let fly one of her knives towards his head. Luckily, she realized he wasn't a holograph at the last nanosecond, and her wrist hesitated just enough to throw her aim off by a few centimeters, the knife embedding itself in the wall beside his head. It was equally lucky that Cato had superb reflexes and jerked out of the way just in time; otherwise she would have nicked him in spite of her momentary hesitation.

"Whoa! What the fuck?!"

"Sorry," she said calmly.

"Where did you learn to do that?" he asked coolly, trying to hide the surge of admiration that had replaced his shock.

She gestured toward the screen in the wall. _Duh_. "You taught yourself?" She nodded. "Do it again."

During their exchange, two more of the holographs had materialized and were rapidly advancing on her. She turned and disposed of them neatly, once again striking each in the left eye.

"You practice with any other weapons?" he asked. She shook her head. "You practice anything else?"

"Climbing," she said.

"Show me." She led him out of the maze of rooms and over to the climbing wall. He leaned against the wall to wait for her to strap herself into her harness, but to his amazement she took a running leap and skittered up to the top of the wall thirty feet above him in about seven seconds, her feet and hands barely touching each grip before launching off and up to the next one.

Cato stared at her in shock while she slipped back down. When she was still six feet off the ground, she let go and twisted in mid-air, landing gracefully on her feet with hardly a sound.

"How did you learn to do that?" He couldn't hide how he impressed he was this time.

She shrugged and looked at him. _Not the most talkative thing, is she?_ He folded his arms and leaned back against the wall to assess her. She had to be decently strong to climb like that, but she was small and she couldn't have that much muscle under her form-fitting, cropped black pants and the shrunken gray zippered hoodie that fit closely to her body. He could, however, see that she had a tiny waist, a flat stomach, a high, tight ass, slim legs, and two lovely… round… firm… _Focus, you asshole_ , he snapped to himself. Thankfully, she appeared to assume that his appraisal of her was an objective one meant to gauge her physical fitness and skill level.

Speaking of her physical fitness and skill level...she could probably make it pretty far in the arena. Easily down to the final eight. And with training...well, she might be the last non-Career standing. Brutus and Enobaria had been making fun of him mercilessly about his mentoring situation, but he thought maybe he could get her to the top 5 before Clove or Clay took her out, cementing his reputation as one of the best mentors. _That'll shut 'em up_. That's what he would do then, he'd train her just enough to make her last most of the games, but not enough to have her survive. It would give him something to focus on for the next couple of months, something to keep the empty feeling at bay. He wouldn't tell any of the others about his plan so he could have the satisfaction of watching the disbelief on their faces when they saw what she could do. Well, he may have to tell Clay about her talent with knives so he could avoid taking a blade in the eye, but he wouldn't do that until a day or two before the games. He pushed himself off the wall with his foot and started walking back toward the weapons room.

"Come on," he called over his shoulder. "I want you to try out the spears."

He had decided she should practice archery and throwing light spears to make her more versatile with long-range weapons. And she needed to learn some hand-to-hand combat for defensive purposes, although ideally she shouldn't get close enough to anyone to have to engage in it. Swords were no good, he told her. Most would be too heavy for her and her reach was too short. Weight training wasn't worth it at all. She already had enough strength to climb with ease, and even if she lifted weights every day up until the games, she'd never be able to overpower most of the male tributes, so it would be a "poor return on her investment." _Whatever that means_ , she thought. He said she needed to continue climbing every day. And to keep practicing sprinting and running long distances and working on her survival skills. And of course, she needed to keep throwing different kinds of knives.

He told Hera all this as he mapped out a training schedule for the next week for her over dinner. He handed it to her and she scanned it.

"How will I learn the hand-to-hand combat?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Are there holographs I can practice on in that room? I didn't see a training video or a screen like the one in the weapons room in there."

"No, you'll practice with me," he said matter-of-factly.

"Oh. Won't that interfere with your training with your own district people?" she asked neutrally, no judgement or sarcasm in her tone.

"That's why we're practicing in the mornings."

"Won't they think you're a traitor?"

"They will if they find out. But we won't tell them." He looked at Trini pointedly, and she nodded to show that she understood. "Tomorrow. We'll start at 9," he told Hera.

Cato was telling Gianni about his plan to train Hera on the downlow at breakfast the next morning, when she ambled out around 8am, still half-asleep it seemed. She took a seat across from him and slathered a croissant with butter.

"So don't say anything to anyone about her knife throwing or any of it," he was saying. "This way, they'll all underestimate her and they'll never see her coming."

"What about the scoring? " Gianni asked.

Cato was about to tell him that he was going to have Hera downplay her skills to the gamemakers, when he was distracted by the noise issuing from her throat.

"Mmmm. Sooooo goooood," she mumbled. She was chewing the croissant and her eyes were closed.

He side-eyed her.

When she opened her eyes he was still looking at her. "I'm a simple girl," she said, and shrugged. "It's the little things."

"The little things?"

"Yeah, the little things that get me going." He didn't say anything and continued to stare at her caustically. "The little things. Like this," she said looking at the croissant she was holding. "And the first sip of coffee of the day," she said as she added milk to her steaming mug. "And the sunlight in the morning." She gestured towards the window on the eastern wall.

"The little things?" he asked again.

"Yeah. You know what I mean."

"No. I don't."

"You don't have little things that just, like, make your day?"

He studied her. Her hair was pulled into a disheveled knot on top of her head. A few pieces had fallen out and brushed against her collarbone, which peeked out from a white v-neck undershirt. Her lids were heavy over her still-sleepy eyes, and the sunlight that spilled into the room illuminated her cheekbones. _The way you look right now_ , he thought, and then quashed the sentiment immediately. "No," he said flatly.

"Ok then," she said, raising her eyebrows and going back to her croissant. "Sorry I asked."

He was a natural at instructing. His tone and demeanor were icy, of course, and he didn't seem like he was enjoying it at all, but he had a way of explaining concepts and demonstrating techniques that made it easy for Hera to learn quickly.

They spent three hours together that first morning. He taught her how to hold herself defensively and how to block punches and strikes, although he never actually hit her. They did everything in slow motion at first. After a while they worked up to what Hera thought was a normal pace, but Cato told her that no, that was really only about half-speed.

After that, Cato had her practice throwing spears. And then it was noon and he left to go have lunch with his people from 2 and return to his normal routine.

"We'll start at 10 tomorrow instead of 8," he told her. "I'm gonna be out late tonight."

Hera watched the highlights of the 70th games that night. She hadn't really been able to get over how hot Cato was in person yet, although she'd managed to pretend she hadn't noticed. She'd been careful not to let her eyes linger on him, careful to keep her focus on what he was teaching her.

She didn't remember thinking he was that good-looking four years ago when she'd watched him on tv. Maybe it was just because she'd been fourteen, and not really thinking about boys that way yet. She definitely thought he was attractive now, even though it gave her chills to watch him slaughter the other children. It seemed to Hera that he was on some kind of autopilot.

And then there was the part where he had sex with the girl from 1. Hera and Uma had squealed and looked away four years ago when it happened, and Uma's mother had gasped and sent them out of the room immediately.

But Uma's mother wasn't here now, and Hera gaped as she watched it play out. She was a virgin, but she wasn't completely naive. She'd seen men and women have sex a few times and she knew what a penis looked like; when she and Uma were about twelve, they'd learned what sex was from the older girls at school and had spied out back of the bar to watch couples humping in the alley. They'd been both horrified and fascinated. And one time, Hera had been up in a tree when two teenagers stumbled into the woods, giggling and fumbling around. And of course her father had tried...

Still, this was disturbing. Cato and the girl, Luxe, had simply exchanged a quick look while the other Careers slept. Then she'd stood up and walked away from the fire and Cato had followed. They didn't say a word and the whole thing seemed cold and business-like...just like her own interactions with him that morning when he'd trained her.

And his dick was huge. _How the fuck does that fit in there? And why isn't she screaming in pain?_

Hera wrinkled her nose and shivered a little.

He didn't like her, he decided as he sipped his whiskey at the club that night.

He didn't like the look of quiet determination her face took on as she put all of her mental and physical energy into the lesson at hand. She was supposed to be weak and hesitant.

He didn't like that the way he taught and the way she learned fit together neatly, like a key in a well-oiled lock. How they both liked to break a concept down to its most basic elements and focus exclusively on perfecting one thing at a time before moving on to the next. She was supposed to be inept so he could lose patience with her.

He didn't like how she didn't even seem to notice him as a man. Her gaze as she looked at him was steady. It held no trace of desire. She was supposed to want him like all the other girls did.

He didn't like that his attitude of frosty indifference, which usually unnerved people, had no effect on her whatsoever. She was supposed to be intimidated by him.

He didn't like the general aura she gave off. Like an early summer afternoon. Tranquil and warm, but humming with a gentle energy. She was supposed to be undone at the thought of her imminent death.

 _I don't like her_ , he said to himself, as he thrust one final time into the random girl laying facedown beneath him before he came.

It was the second morning of their training and although she'd killed hundreds of holograms with her knives, she'd only just now killed her first one with a spear. "Fatal strike," the system announced, and she clapped her hands in delight and turned to him, grinning. Her eyes reminded him of sunlight sparkling on water. It pissed him off.

"Don't get too excited," he said dryly. "You're still gonna die in there. Clay's gonna win. I'm only doing this with you so you'll be one of the last tributes left, and I can keep my mentoring stats up."

"I know," she said cheerfully, spearing another hologram through the chest.

"Why are you so goddamn happy?"

She turned and grinned at him again. "Cuz fuck it, that's why."

He had nothing to say to that.

When the morning was up, he left and she headed for the climbing wall. When she reached the top and looked down, however, he was still there, watching her.

"Seriously," he said. "Where did you learn to do that?"

"I'm from 7. The trees."

"What, did you just like, climb them all the time?"

"Yeah, pretty much. I loved the woods. I miss them. I haven't been outside since I got here," she sighed sadly.

"Didn't anyone show you the roof?"

"No."

"You can go up on the roof. It's not like the woods or anything. I mean, half of it is just space for hovercrafts to land, but part of it is a garden. There's even some trees."

She was so excited she could have kissed him. But she didn't. "How do I get up there?"

"Come on," he said. He rode the elevator up with her and she gasped with delight when the doors opened. She ran to one of the trees and swung herself up into the branches, settling on one about 12 feet off the ground.

"Thank you! Thank you sooo much! You made my day!"

She was glowing with happiness, pure and unadulterated. Cato wondered how she could get so excited about something so simple. Especially since she was going to be dead in less than three months. She should be freaking out. It irritated him that she wasn't.

"It's really not that big of a deal," he said dryly. "I don't get why you're so excited."

"I miss the feeling of fresh air on my skin," she said, smiling and lifting her face to the breeze.

"Is that one of your _little things_?" he sneered.

Hera hated being mocked, and her quick mind started to form a retort, but she remembered who it was below her and, anyway, she was enjoying the sun and the wind too much, so she held her tongue. "Yes," she said. "I really can't believe you don't have any little things. Everyone has them, whether they realize it or not."

"I do have one, now that I think about it."

She was intrigued. "What is it?"

"Tributes who keep their mouths shut and don't annoy me with pointless conversation."

 _Christ he was rude_. "You know, you have another little thing I can think of." _Don't say it, Hera. Don't say it_.

He snorted. "Looks like someone can't take a hint." He rolled his eyes and sighed. "What is it?"

"Your dick." She knew it wasn't true-she'd just seen it on video the night before, but she was furious. His eyes remained icy, but she could feel fury rolling off of him in spite of the distance between them, and she was glad she was up in the branches.

"You ungrateful cunt," he growled. "I didn't want to help you in the first place."

"Then don't. I never asked you to. I was doing just fine before you decided to grace me with your presence."

He scoffed. "You need me. You won't last five minutes in there without my help."

"Pretty sure that knife I almost put through your eye a couple days ago proves otherwise." _Why couldn't she just keep her mouth shut?_

"Why don't you come down here and we'll see how you do without a knife?"

"Why don't you fuck off and leave me alone?"

"You better shut that smart little mouth of yours."

"Come up here and make me." She glared down at him defiantly.

He glared back up at her for a few seconds. "It's easy to talk shit from up there, isn't it? If I did decide to make you, you'd punk out before I made it any farther than the first branch. But I'm not gonna bother. You aren't worth the effort," he spat and turned and stalked away.

She didn't speak a word to him the next morning, simply nodded as he briefly and coldly explained to her how to relax her limbs to avoid injury if she was tackled or thrown to the ground. And then it was time to practice.

He was determined to break her. He wanted to see her in tears, cowering in fear from him, so he slammed her into the mat using the maximum amount of force he could without injuring her. He knocked the wind out of her over and over again, but she just got back up each time once she regained her breath, with a defiant look in her eye. He hated her for that look. And he hated how she didn't flinch as he took a step toward her to do it all over again. And how she didn't cry out as her body made contact with the ground.

He grew so angry that eventually he picked her up by the back of her neck and slammed her down face-first. She didn't move for a few seconds, and he started to wonder if he'd accidentally knocked her out. But then she rolled over, and blood was streaming from her nose.

"Ohhhh, shiiiiit," he said and backed up a step. The sight of her bleeding caused all of his anger to dissipate.

She stood and wiped the blood from her nose with the back of her hand, her eyes still hard.

"Let's do it again," she said calmly, looking him straight in the eyes.

He just stood there, staring at her as though he hadn't heard her right.

"Again," she said, still softly, but this time with more intensity, taking a step toward him.

He backed up a step. She took another step forward.

"Come on," she challenged. "Again."

He didn't move, so she shoved him in the chest. He was so disconcerted that he actually backed up into the wall. "Again." She lifted her chin to maintain eye contact with him, and she was so close that he could see the flecks of silver in her blue-green irises. He couldn't look away from her face.

"Fine," she said softly. "But don't ever accuse me of punking out." And she walked out of the room.

Cato sat in his room and watched her reaping over and over again later that morning. He had been right about one thing the first time he saw it a couple of weeks ago. She was definitely operating in a state of mild shock. But he was pretty sure he was wrong about her being soft. Her voice when she volunteered was unwavering and certain. And he was struck by the way she pushed the other girls in her age group aside as she moved to the center aisle. Resolutely, without hesitation.

He couldn't stop thinking about her as he sat with Brutus and Alec to watch Clay train that afternoon. Or as he worked out. He wondered if her nose hurt. It hadn't looked broken, but he wasn't sure. He had actually felt the urge to go check on her, but he didn't know what to say to her, or even what the point of checking on her would be. And he was pretty sure she wasn't expecting him to seek her out. She probably didn't want to see him. So he avoided her.

He replayed their exchange from the day before in his head. He'd been the one to tell her about the roof, and then to take her up there. She'd never asked him for any of it. And then, when she expressed gratitude, he'd gotten annoyed. So he'd tried to dampen her spirit. And when that worked, when he'd actually achieved his goal and she snapped at him, he'd gotten angry with her. _None of it was her fault. I wasn't gonna let her win no matter what._

That night, Cato went out as usual, but he still couldn't stop thinking about Hera.

A little after midnight, he looked around the club, chose a girl at random, and did his usual wink and smirk. Brutus laughed and Alec clapped him on the back, and Cato gave them a farewell nod before sauntering up to the girl. "Wanna get out of here?" he asked without pretense. She giggled, and he took her by the hand to lead her outside. He walked with her for about a block, and then yanked his hand from hers and told her to get lost. She stared at him, confused and humiliated, but he stalked away from her, and back toward the training center without another word.

He woke up before sunrise the next morning, and he couldn't go back to sleep, so he decided to go for a run around the city. Early morning was really the only time he could run in peace in the Capitol, because the streets were mostly empty. He tended to attract too much attention any other time of day.

The sky was just beginning to turn from indigo to a bluish gray, and it was foggy out, so the light from the streetlamps took on a hazy quality that Cato found comforting.

 _I like this_ , he thought. _It's peaceful_. And then he stopped in his tracks.

Hera wondered if her and Cato's short-lived relationship as mentor and protégé was over with. She was perfectly ok with it if it was. They hadn't seen each other since the day before when she'd walked out on him and straight into her bathroom. Her hands shook as she held a cold cloth to her nose, but she refused to give in to the urge to cry.

As much as she hoped she'd never see him again, she was determined not to be the one to give in, so she trudged into her training complex at 9am the next morning, her body bruised, her nose a little sore but not broken, and decided to climb the wall a few times as she waited to see if he would show. She hoped he wouldn't.

She had just reached the top when he entered. She stilled herself when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, and turned her body in his direction as he approached the base of the wall. He looked up at her. She looked down at him. Neither of them said anything. She slipped down the wall, light as a feather, and turned to face him as her feet touched the ground. They were an arm's length apart, and they stared at one another for a few breaths.

"When I go running early in the morning and it's still foggy…the way the streetlights look," he said quietly.

She felt her eyes widen the slightest bit as she realized that he was trying to apologize. She knew better than to smile, and she knew better than to say anything in return. It would ruin the moment. So she simply turned and walked to the sparring room. He followed on her heel, and his hands on her waist were gentle that morning as he taught her to curl herself inwards when he tossed her-with very little force-onto her back.


	5. Chapter 5

They didn't talk all that much, but they did tell each other some things.

She told him how her mother had died and her father was an alcoholic, and she had basically raised herself from age eight. She told him about Uma, and about Tara and Cole, Reese and Mia.

He told her that his parents had sent him to the Academy at the age of six, that his father had attended it too, just a few years after it had been founded and had wanted to be a tribute more than anything, but that someone else had been chosen over him, and so it was really important to him that Cato enter the games. "Even though that's what he wanted, I think he resents me for being chosen, and for winning," he told Hera.

She didn't tell him about the beatings or the time she'd spent in the trees. She didn't tell him about Dean, although she wasn't quite sure why she was so reluctant to share this piece of information.

He didn't tell her that he couldn't remember his games, and that he had nightmares about the only thing he could remember from them. He didn't tell her how empty he felt inside, and that he sometimes wondered if hanging himself would be the only way to fix it.

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"Hoodies," he said, shoving his hands into the pocket of the gray one he was wearing.

"Thunderstorms," she said.

"The sound frogs make at night."

"Catching fireflies."

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He spent days teaching her how to get out of all kinds of sticky situations. When someone grabbed her hair from behind. When someone pinned her to a tree or to the ground. When someone put her in a chokehold. They practiced until it had become instinctive for her, until she didn't think, she just moved.

One day, she lay on her back on the mat and he knelt between her legs. "Grab one of my forearms with both of your hands. That way I can't grab both of your wrists. I'll still be able to grab one, but it will be easier for you to escape. Good. Now bend your leg and dig your knee into my stomach. Good. Use your other leg to scramble back away from me. Good. Ready to put it all together?"

She nodded. He charged her. She wasn't fast enough and he pinned her to the ground. She got her knee into his stomach but she couldn't wrench herself from his grasp. "You gotta catch my forearm first, Hera," he told her, firmly but gently, hovering overtop of her with her wrists in his hands. "Otherwise the rest of it won't do any good. Again."

But he held onto her for just a second longer. _How delicate the bones of your wrists feel between my fingers_ , he thought.

 _The sound of my name in your mouth_ , she thought, and wondered why it suddenly felt like someone had tied a string to the place between her legs and was tugging on it.

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"Cats sitting in windows," she said.

"The air right when fall turns into winter," he said.

"What about it?"

"Everything. How it feels, how it smells. I don't know how to describe it."

"Sharp and clean," she said. "Metallic. Like a knife blade."

He turned to look at her, astonished at how she'd known exactly what he'd meant. How easily she'd been able to put it into words for him.

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He'd spent the majority of his time as a trainer at the Academy teaching swordsmanship, so he had never really studied Clay in hand-to-hand combat until now. He noticed that the tribute sometimes made two simple, avoidable mistakes as he and Alec engaged in a boxing match. First, he dropped his left shoulder, and by extension his hand, leaving that side of his face vulnerable. And second, his eyes lingered for too long on the part of his opponent's body he intended to strike next, making it easy for them to anticipate what he was going to do and dodge the blow. Brutus and the other mentors admonished him to correct these weaknesses, but neither Clay nor his trainers seemed to understand _why_ he committed them in the first place. _It's when he gets the upperhand. He gets complacent, and he doesn't realize he's doing it until someone points it out_ , Cato realized.

If Cato were fighting him, he would lure Clay into complacency, and then jab him in the left side of his face. _But if I were short, I'd need to use an uppercut_ , _not a jab_ , he thought.

Cato knew he should share his observation with Clay, but for some reason he couldn't explain to himself, he didn't.

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Word had gotten around the Capitol that the mentors were not taking the rule change seriously. Of course, none of the commentators mentioned it on tv, but the citizens were talking about it in restaurants and at parties.

President Snow was not happy. He could not have the Capitol citizens thinking him weak-willed or that his decrees were not to be taken seriously. The Peacekeepers were told to strictly guard the entrances to the tributes' apartments and training complexes. Mentors were not to have any contact with the tributes from their own District.

Seneca Crane and Plutarch Heavensbee were to meet with each and every mentor to make sure this was crystal clear.

And so, one day at lunchtime about two months before the Games were set to begin, Heavensbee took the elevator to the seventh floor to try to find Cato, who was usually known to be waking up right around this time. No one answered his knock at the apartment door, but he thought he heard something from the training complex.

"Good," said a voice from the sparring room. "Time to add something new to the mix. Tomorrow I'll start teaching you to box."

Heavensbee knew that voice. It was Cato's. _Is he actually training his tribute?_

"Let's do this a couple more times," Cato said, and Heavensbee angled himself in the dark hallway so he could see into the room as the victor charged the little tribute from District 7. He caught her by the hair briefly but she turned her body in towards him, ducking under his arm and out of his hold.

"Yeah," she said. "It's definitely time to move onto boxing. I can't remember the last time you managed to actually catch me." There was mischief in her voice. "I don't even think you can anymore. Maybe you're losing your edge."

In an instant, Cato caught her by the waist and hauled her to the ground, pinning her to the mat to lay between her legs. He moved one hand down to squeeze her hip and with the other he grasped the messy bun on top of her head, tugging it so that she had to arch her back up and press her chest into his. Their noses were almost touching. "What's that you said?" he asked, his voice low and menacing.

Heavensbee panicked and was about to call for a Peacekeeper when the girl spoke again. "I _said_ I think you're losing your edge." There wasn't an ounce of fear in her voice.

Cato slid the hand that was on her hip down the back of her thigh and stopped when he reached behind her knee. She shivered and let out a gasp, trying not to laugh.

"A little ticklish there, are we? What's that you said again?"

"I said I think I still have some room for improvement."

Cato stood and lifted the girl up by her waist, but, as if to make sure she understood who was boss, he held her off the ground so that her face was level with his. "That's what I thought you said," he whispered, and set her down.

Heavensbee ducked into the weight room just as the two of them turned towards the doorway. The girl walked out first and Cato followed behind and the gamemaker could have sworn the expression on his face as he gazed down at the top of her head was one of tenderness.

Obviously Cato was training her, but surely his fellow mentors from 2 weren't aware? Would Cato admit to him that he was helping her, or would he try to keep it a secret? This was all very intriguing.

Heavensbee waited for about five minutes before he knocked on the apartment door.

"Can I speak with you privately?" he asked the mentor.

Cato narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously, but stepped out into the hallway and closed the door. "Yes?"

"The President is aware that the mentors have not exactly been honoring the rule change. I'm here to let you know that that arrangement can no longer continue. You will not be allowed to have any contact with Clay or Clove for the remainder of the training period or the Games. And you will also need to cut way back on your evening festivities. It's causing talk among the citizens. A good mentor needs his rest, you know."

"Seriously?" Cato spat out, glaring at the gamemaker. "It's a fucking waste of my time to train her. She's worthless."

 _Two can play this game_. "I'm not saying you _have_ to train her, my friend. I'm simply saying that you may not train Clay or Clove, and that you must make it _appear_ as though you are training your assigned tribute."

"So if I don't train her and I can't go down to the second floor, what am I supposed to do all day? Sit around and jerk myself off?"

"If that'll get you through the next two months, by all means. Now, may I stay and have lunch with you and your lovely little tribute?" Heavensbee asked, doing his best to make his voice sound slightly sinister. "I was very impressed with her at the Parade, and I'd like to get to know her a little better." He put special emphasis on that last phrase.

"I'd be delighted," Cato ground out sarcastically, and the flash of rage in his eyes may have been a result of being inconvenienced and annoyed by the gamemaker's unwanted presence, but Heavensbee got the feeling it stemmed from the urge to protect his tribute from lewd, middle-aged men.

He made polite conversation with the girl-Hera, that was her name-throughout the meal, and subtly observed her interactions with her mentor. The two of them hardly spoke. She pretended to be timid and unsure of herself around Cato, and he pretended to be indifferent to her, but Heavensbee could have cut the sexual tension between the two of them with a knife.

It was more than that, though. He'd known Cato for four years now, had seen him pick up girls at political banquets and cocktail parties, and he'd never once seen him look at anyone the way he looked at her.

He didn't know if he could use this little romance to aid in his plans for revolution, but Heavensbee was a hoarder of possibilities. So he added this one to his arsenal of weapons, knowing there might come a time to dust it off and use it against the President.

"Now my dear, I've had the pleasure of visiting 7 several times, and I must say, the forest is just lovely," he said to Hera.

Her eyes lit up and she opened her mouth to say something, but she caught a warning glance from Cato and suppressed her energy. "Yes," she said. "It's pretty, although I've never spent much time in there."

The glance had obviously been meant to tell her not to give away some secret. Which meant that her next statement had been a lie. She had spent a lot of time in the woods.

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"Good, now we won't have to cram all of our training into the morning," Cato said out loud after Heavensbee had left.

 _Good, now I can be near her all the time,_ the little voice in the back of his head whispered.

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That night at dinner, Heavensbee brought up the topic of the arena to Seneca. There were two unused ones ready and waiting. One was a tropical rainforest, the other a temperate woodland. They had not yet decided which would be used this year, and which would be enhanced for the Third Quarter Quell the following year. He told Seneca all of his wonderful ideas for mutts and engineered "natural" disasters in the rainforest dome for the Quell.

They chose to use the woodlands for the 74th Games.

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"This fucking sucks, man," Cato told Alec when he saw him a few days later in the Victors' workout room. "It's so boring. And their stupid girly chatter at dinner...they talk about the dumbest shit. It makes me want to stab myself in the eardrum. I'm in bed by like 8 every night."

"Tell me about it," Alec said. "I'm going insane being stuck in that apartment. You wouldn't believe how much porn I've watched the last couple of days."

Cato laughed "Maybe I'll start doing that."

"Or you could go for the real thing. I mean I haven't seen much of your tribute, but she seems decent looking from what I can tell."

"Yeah but then I'll have to train her if I'm gonna fuck her." He rolled his eyes. "It's only fair."

"No you wouldn't. The ladies love you. She's probably sitting around drooling over the thought of getting some dick from you."

"You think?" Cato grinned sadistically.

"Yeah. And anyway, who cares. Train her a little. Have some fun with it. That way she'll stay alive for a while and maybe Clay can hit it in the arena."

Cato wanted to pick up the forty pound hand weight and smash Alec's teeth down his throat. But he forced himself to laugh instead.

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He taught her jabs and crosses and hooks. But he made her practice uppercuts on the punching bag for what seemed like an eternity.

"Why are you so obsessed with the uppercut?" she asked sullenly.

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Cato was sipping scotch on the rocks while they waited for dinner to be served. "This sound," he said, and shook his drink gently, causing the ice to clink pleasantly against the glass.

Hera tilted her head to listen. "I like it too," she said, and smiled softly.

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He selected the lightest bow from the wall and taught her how to nock the arrow. She caught on quickly enough, so he moved on to teaching her proper stance and how to hold the bow. He demonstrated and then told her it was her turn. She imitated him, but when she looked over to ask him if she was doing it correctly, he wasn't there. She saw his arms on either side of her, felt the warmth of his chest radiate onto her back, sensed his chin just above her head. He nudged her foot slightly with his own to improve her stance, and his fingers closed over hers to adjust her grip. She held back a shiver and forced herself to focus on perfecting her grip, but the tugging feeling had started up between her thighs. _The scars on your knuckles_ , she thought, as her first arrow missed the holograph completely.

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"The hair on a baby's head. It feels silky. Downy," she said.

"Wouldn't know. Never held a baby."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Don't you want kids someday?"

He shrugged. "Never really thought about it. Do you?"

"Yes. Lots of them. I would have made a good mother."

Her last sentence sent a jolt of pain through him that hurt worse than the time he'd accidentally shocked himself as he plugged his new tv into his mansion in Victors' Village.

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 _Stop. Stop this now_ , he told himself at night. _Nothing good will come of it. Stop, stop, stop_.

He'd resolve to go back to being his usual self, to act like he had with her the first day he'd trained her, and then give in the moment he saw her in the morning, like an alcoholic taking their first sip of the day. He'd be drunk off of her by noon.

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"Ok, I'm gonna swing at your face, but I'm not gonna make contact. Your forehead is the least vulnerable part of your head, so if you can't dodge a strike to the face, try to catch it there. And I want you to focus on keeping your mouth shut, keeping your tongue away from your teeth." He swung at her with alarming force, but stopped short just millimeters from her face.

They'd practice something else for a while and then he'd swing at her face out of nowhere. "Did you tuck your tongue?" he'd ask.

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"In the morning when you're not quite awake but you're not asleep anymore, and you're all warm and cozy under the covers," she said when she pattered softly out to the breakfast table.

"When you get into bed at night and the sheets are nice and cold," he countered, pouring coffee into a mug for her. He added a generous splash of milk, just like she liked it, and stirred it before pushing it across the table to her.

She wrinkled her nose. "I disagree."

"You have your things, I have mine."

Gianni looked back and forth between them. "What are you talking about?"

"It's a game we play," Hera explained. "We list off all the little things we like."

"Can I play?" Gianni asked.

"No," Cato said.

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Sometimes she caught his eyes on her and the look in them made her suddenly feel shy.

Sometimes he smiled at her—a real smile, not one of his smirks—and her stomach turned itself over.

Sometimes he leaned forward as he sat on the couch, with his legs wide and his elbows on his knees, and Hera wanted to crawl into the cave his body made, where it looked safe and warm, and curl up in a ball with her head tucked under his chin. She wondered what he'd do if she just stood up from her chair, walked over to him and did it. The thought made her sad. Because she knew what he'd do. He'd ask her what the hell she was doing and push her away.

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He stood behind her and he wrapped the rope around his hands and then he slipped it over her neck. He looked down at the top of her head.

"Your first instinct is going to be to be to try to step forward, but don't. Don't strain against it, you'll choke yourself out. Back up into me, turn towards me. Duck and shove. Good."

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She told him about nighttime in the woods. About the owls hooting as the moonbeams filtered through the trees and illuminated their soft, silvery feathers. About the foxes creeping through the undergrowth and how sometimes she used to sneak eggs out of the house to leave as a treat for them.

He told her about the grassy plains where he came from, and how he used to like to go out in the early morning to lay in them and watch the sun rise and listen to the thrushes sing.

She didn't tell him that she loved the feeling of his full weight pressing into her as he pinned her down on the mat, even though it was torture because it made her ache with an emptiness she'd never felt before, one that lay just behind the tugging feeling and in between her hips.

He didn't tell her that he had taken to jerking off just before they started hand-to-hand combat every morning, because he was worried that if he didn't, he'd get a hard-on as his hands spanned the curve of her waist before he threw her to the ground.

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Dinner wasn't for another hour.

He was sprawled drowsily on the couch, his arm behind his head. She was curled up in a ball in one of the armchairs. The rain beat down on the glass of the windows.

"Naps on rainy days," he murmured, just before he fell asleep.

"Mmmm, I agree," she sighed, and snuggled deeper into her blanket.

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Clay had broken her neck and he stood over her body, crowing in triumph. She lay on her stomach on the grass, her head twisted awkwardly to one side. Her eyes were open, but lifeless.

Cato shot up off of the couch, his heart pounding. He let out a sigh of relief when he saw Hera's topknot peeking out from under the blanket. _Jesus_ he thought, and shook himself. _I need a drink._

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"When you stretch just right and your whole spine cracks," he said as he walked into the living room, and Hera could tell by his satisfied tone that this exact scenario had just occurred.

"God that sounds good. It hasn't happened to me in forever."

"Lay down on the floor on your stomach," he said. Hera complied and he told her when to inhale and when to exhale as he applied pressure to either side of her spine, working his way down her back. Hera felt her bones melt and shift into alignment as she heard a series of soft pops issue from her body.

"Ohhh-ho-oh," she moaned. "I can't get up now. I'm too comfortable."

He laughed softly at her and picked her up by her waist to set her on her feet.

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"How are you so calm about this?" he asked her.

"Weren't you calm?"

"No, I couldn't wait for it to start. I just looked calm."

"But you weren't scared, and that's what you really meant to ask me. Why I don't seem scared."

"Well, I had trained for my whole life. And I knew I was gonna win. And yes, that's what I meant."

"I _am_ scared. But haven't you ever watched old or terminally sick people who know they're going to die? They don't sit around shaking in fear and crying. They accept it. I figure this is like that."

"No, it isn't. You have control over this. You don't have to accept it." He was starting to get angry.

She laughed gently, trying to calm him. "We both know I'm gonna die. Those were the first words you ever said to me, remember. You said 'You know you're gonna die right?'"

He didn't look at her. "I'm gonna go across the hall and lift weights," he said after a couple of minutes.

When he returned an hour later, his knuckles were bruised and bloody.

Hera had no reason to go into her weight room, but if she had, she'd have noticed the broken mirror and the dents in the wall.

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She was eating the first ice cream sundae she'd ever had in her life. With chocolate sauce and whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles. And a maraschino cherry on top. She ate it slowly, wonderingly, and Cato watched her in fascination. She scooped up some whipped cream and took little licks, watching the fluffy cloud on her spoon grow smaller and smaller. She used her finger to swipe the last bit of chocolate sauce from the bowl.

But it was the cherry she liked best. She had saved it until last. "Mmmm," she moaned, pulling off the stem as she sucked the juice out of the little red jewel. " _This_ ," she said to Cato, pointing at her mouth.

Cato abruptly dismissed himself from the table, his dick half hard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gianni smirk at him. He gave him the finger.

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Clay had decapitated her. Her head lay a few feet from her body. The air was filled with the sound of hundreds of flies buzzing as they swarmed the point of severance, crawling over the flesh and bones, the exposed nerves and veins.

Cato's eyes snapped open. He was shaking and he felt like throwing up. He went into his bathroom and splashed his face with cold water.

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"Smelling the pages of a book," she said.

"That's weird."

"Of course _you'd_ think so. Have you ever even read one?" she teased.

He tried to scowl. _Your smart little mouth_.

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He opened the top drawer of his nightstand and pulled out his worn copy of _The Jungle Book._ His mother had read it to him when he was a young child, and he'd brought it with him to the Academy and hid it from the other boys under his mattress.

He opened it at random and put his nose to the page. She was right. It was nice. Why had he never thought to do this before?

He looked at the page he'd opened it to, and read the first line that caught his eye. "Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance." Baloo the bear speaking to Bagheera the panther about Mowgli the man-cub.

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"Picking up a handful of sand and letting it run through your fingers," he said.

"I wouldn't know."

"No?"

"I've never been to the beach. Never seen the ocean."

"Oh." _Of course not. When would she have gone?_

So he told her about the color of the sea. And how the air smelled like salt. And how the wet sand was like brown sugar.

He didn't believe in a god, but that night he begged whatever was out there to let her survive so he could walk with her on the beach when they stopped at 4 on her Victory Tour.

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Clay was smashing her skull in with a rock. "Cato!" she screamed. "Cato!" But with each strike the rock came away bloodier, and his name on her lips became softer until it turned from a scream into a whimper. And the light began to seep out of her eyes like the tide going back out to sea.

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He punched her in the stomach for the first time the next day. He was pretty sure it traumatized him more than her.

"Tighten your stomach, stretch your abs," he told her. "Don't curl in on yourself. And for the love of god do _not_ inhale when I make contact. Don't hold your breath either. Exhale."

She refused to let on that she was in pain, but he could tell he'd hurt her by the way she held her body as she sat down to dinner that evening. Stiffly. Gingerly. He felt like an animal was tearing his heart to pieces with its claws.

 _Better she she should be bruised by me, better she should be bruised by me_ , he repeated to himself, over and over again.

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He told her his observations about Clay. How he got sloppy when he thought he had the upper hand. How he dropped his left shoulder, how his eyes sent a clear message to his target of what his next move would be.

They sparred, and he repeatedly dropped his left shoulder, taught her to take advantage of it, to slip in an uppercut whenever that happened. He taught her to watch his eyes so that she knew how to dodge his punches, and how to roll with them if she couldn't get out of the way in time.

"Won't he just like snap my neck?" she asked. "None of this is gonna do me any good."

"If he gets to you early on, yeah, you're screwed. But they want more of a show the longer the games go on. If there's only a handful of you left, and especially if it comes down to the two of you, he'll toy with you, he'll drag it out. And the weaker he thinks you are, the better it is for you. He'll start soft, tossing you around a little. He'll get cocky, he'll get sloppy. You can trick him."

Hera stared at him in disbelief. "No I can't. Are you kidding me? He's like twice my size. My punches will feel like love taps."

"Is that what this was? A love tap?" he teased, pointing to the bruised jaw she'd given him that morning.

She scowled. "No. You have to _love_ someone to give them a love tap."

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She was sitting at the desk in the corner, researching something and smelling her hands.

" _What_ are you _doing_?" he asked.

She looked slightly embarrassed. "How your hands still smell good for a long time after you peel an orange," she said sheepishly.

"Yeah?" He smiled and walked over to her.

"Yeah." She lifted her hands, palms up. He placed one of his hands on the desk, the other on the back of her chair as he leaned down, closing his eyes and inhaling. _Your_ _eyelashes against your cheeks_ she thought.

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Hera had just pulled the bowstring taut when she felt the heat of Cato's chest against her back, just like the day he first taught her to nock the arrow. Except this time his body was actually touching hers, flush up against it. "Like this," he whispered into her ear, adjusting her fingers ever so slightly. Together, they loosed the string and the arrow made a satisfying _thud_ as it hit the target. She felt his hands come around her waist and she dropped the bow. Then his lips were on her neck, and she let out a soft moan and allowed her head to fall back against him. He took her skin between his teeth and started to suck while he splayed a hand on her ribs, just under her breast, brushing his thumb over her nipple. He slid the other hand down the front of her pants. She whimpered and felt her knees go weak when he ran a finger across her opening.

She was soaking wet and throbbing when she woke up. She slid her own hand down into her shorts, trying to rub the feeling away, not sure what she was trying to accomplish, but knowing she was seeking some kind of relief. She gave up after a few minutes with a frustrated sigh and squeezed her thighs together.

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 _Stop. Please stop_ , he begged himself as he sat on the edge of his bed, holding his head in his hands.

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He started to put it all together. He threw her to the ground, and he pinned her, and he punched her, and she took it like a champ. She relaxed her limbs, and landed on her shoulders. She rolled with his punches. She squirmed out of his hold. Sometimes she punched him back.

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"Hot showers," she said.

"Really?" Cato asked.

"Yeah. You take them for granted, but we don't have them in 7. We have to heat water on the stove and fill an aluminum tub. By the time you get it full enough to cover to your waist, the first batches of water you put in there are lukewarm. So there you are, sitting in lukewarm water, freezing from the waist up." Cato tried not to picture Hera sitting wet and naked in a tub. "My first shower here, I thought I was in heaven. I just stood there under the hot water for like 15 minutes before I even touched the soap."

Cato frowned and fidgeted, looking down at his crotch. _Why do you do this to me?_ he asked his penis as it started to harden. _I thought we were friends_.

 _Don't blame me_ it responded. _This is her fault_.

"Why do you do that?" she asked.

Cato snapped his head up. "Do what?" he asked, slightly panicked. Had she noticed?

She gave him a funny look, clearly wondering why he was so jumpy. "You get all judgy about my little things."

"No I don't."

"Then what was that reaction you just had?"

"I was getting judgy about your little thing," he lied.

"Thought so."

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He watched himself through her eyes as she reviewed the footage of his games, and he hated himself. He was a monster. He wanted to yell at her to stop, and he wanted to throw the remote at the tv, but he knew there was knowledge to be gleaned from her watching him roll with the punches of the District 1 tribute. And anyway, it wasn't like she hadn't seen coverage of his games before. She'd been fourteen the year he entered the arena, old enough to watch and old enough to remember. Still, he cringed at how sociopathic he seemed as he offed the other tributes, and how cold he looked as he turned Luxe around without so much as kissing her, bent her over, and fucked her from behind, hard and fast, against the tree. When they were done, he simply tucked himself back in his boxers, zipped his pants up, and turned away from her without a word to return to his sleeping bag alone.

When the footage was over, Hera turned to him. "Would you have killed Dani if the gator hadn't?" she asked calmly.

He eyed her cautiously. This was not how he had expected her to react. "Yes. Why?"

"Cuz you knew her."

"Not that well."

"Didn't you train together at the Academy and after you volunteered?"

"Every once in awhile at the Academy, but they kept boys and girls separate from each other most of the time. They didn't want a female and a male tribute caring too much about each other, because even if one of them was willing to die so the other could win, it could end up dragging both of them down. You're less disciplined, less calculating, more likely to make careless or desperate mistakes when push comes to shove in the arena if you're attached. You become each other's weaknesses. Makes you both vulnerable. So I mostly trained with other guys since there's no chance of competing against each other. And after I volunteered we formed an alliance with 1," he continued. "So I trained just as much with them as I did with Dani. And you saw the final showdown…."

"What if I'd been reaped that year? Would you have killed me?"

He stiffened. "Why would you ask that question?"

"Just answer it."

"Yes."

"What if you were thrown into the arena with me this year?"

"It wouldn't happen."

"Ok, but if it did."

"Well it wouldn't, so..."

She sat up from her reclining position. "Cato."

He stood up from the couch, his discomfort manifesting itself physically. "I'm not discussing hypotheticals that will never happen with you."

"Cato!"

 _Was this some kind of a trap?_ "This is stupid."

"Because the answer is yes you would, or no you wouldn't?"

"Hera, why the fuck does it matter?"

"Because of what you said about being careless if you're attached. Wouldn't it be the same with the tributes you mentor? That you'd be more likely to make a careless mistake? Like with Alec and Thea. Were you attached to them?"

"No," he said truthfully.

"But you had sex with Thea."

"How do you know that?" he asked indignantly.

"I heard Gianni and Trini talking about it."

Cato rolled his eyes. _Of course._ "I've had sex with lots of girls, Hera. I've never been attached to any of them." She looked skeptical. "You saw the footage of me with that girl during my games didn't you? Did I look attached?"

"No."

"Exactly."

"But you trained Thea for three months."

"Actually it was more like five because I started working with her one-on-one back in 2 as soon as she was chosen by the Academy to volunteer."

"And you weren't attached to her?"

"No."

"You had sex with her just as impersonally as you did that girl from 1?"

"Yes, oh my god Hera! What is the _point_ of this?"

"So you could have killed her and Alec if you'd been thrown into the arena with them even after you trained them?"

"Yes!"

"So if you and I were thrown into the arena together this year, could you kill me?"

Cato understood now. She was seeking reassurance that he could stay objective and focused during the games. "Yes," he lied. _No. I would protect you with every fiber of my being so that we'd be the last two, and then I'd run myself through with my sword. I would starve to death for you. I would light myself on fire for you._

"Good," she said and relaxed back against the couch.

"That was fucked up, Hera," he said, and sat back down. "Alec and Thea would never have asked me that."

"Well I'm not Alec and I'm not Thea."

"Truer words were never spoken."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" she asked.

"Whatever you want it to."

They pulled up footage of the 71st games.

She didn't tell him that what she'd really been asking was if he cared about her, and that it had taken everything in her to make her voice sound satisfied when she said "Good." Or that she'd had to hide her eyes from him so he wouldn't see the disappointment in them.

He didn't tell her that it made his chest hurt when she said "Good." Because it meant that it didn't bother her that he'd basically just told her he didn't care about her. It meant she didn't care about him.


	6. Chapter 6

Hera eyed the dark-red lacquered pumps dubiously. "I don't think this is such a good idea," she told Trini. "What if I break my ankle?" The heels had to be at least four inches high.

"Well that's why we're going to practice, silly," Trini said to her. "You have to wear them. Gianni's designed the perfect outfit for the sponsor gala next week and it won't look complete without these."

Hera slipped them on and stood up hesitantly, unsure of how to balance herself in them. Trini held her by the arm and let her just stand there for a couple of minutes as she adjusted to the feeling of putting her weight onto the balls of her feet. Then she practiced taking small, slow steps, letting the heel touch the ground before setting the rest of her foot down. After a while, Hera found that she could walk at a natural pace in the heels. She turned her head to the side to look at her reflection in the window, and felt a vain rush of pleasure as she noticed how the heels made her legs look long and lean, her rear end high and tight. She turned to where Trini stood at the far end of the living room and let out a giggle. The escort smiled at her warmly. "Alright, darling, that's enough for today. Tomorrow we'll practice walking up and down stairs in them. Take one more strut across the room for good measure."

As she reached Trini, the other woman looked past her shoulder and smiled. "Look at how quickly and gracefully she learned to walk in stilettos, Cato!" Hera turned around in surprise, and suddenly she felt foolish, standing there in her usual cropped leggings and hoodie...and high heels. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and ducked her head, not wanting to meet his eyes.

"She's learned everything I've taught her so far quickly and gracefully," he said. "I wouldn't have thought this would be any different."

It was the only praise he'd ever given her, apart from the clipped "Good" he uttered when she showed progress in hand-to-hand combat or weapons training. She couldn't help herself; her head shot up and she grinned from ear to ear. He looked taken aback for a second, but then he grinned back at her, his eyes dancing.

And then Gianni walked in and ruined the moment.

"Ooo girl! Look. At. You! You're gonna do me proud at the sponsor gala! Do you see this Cato? Come look at our girl."

"I see her," Cato said quietly, eyes locked on hers, laughter edging his voice.

"Here in the Capitol we call those fuck-me pumps. And she does look positively fuckable, doesn't she, Cato?" Gianni said, raising his eyebrows lewdly at the other man.

Hera froze, eyes wide, cheeks turning as red as her shoes. Cato burst out laughing and threw his head back, watching her embarrassment take shape on her face through his half-closed lids. "Oh, Gianni…you crazy motherfucker." he said. _Yes, yes she does._

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He usually went out to dinner with the guys once or twice a week. One night, when he came home, Hera had fallen asleep at the desk, the screen open to a tutorial on stitching up wounds, her hoodie slung across the back of her chair. She was wearing shorts and a tank top. He'd never seen that much of her skin.

Her thighs and shoulders were covered in bruises. The newer ones were purplish and red, the older ones faded into greens and yellows. He reached out to hook a finger into the hem of her tank top, but hesitated and looked at her face to be sure she wouldn't wake. Satisfied that she was out cold, he carefully lifted the thin white cotton an inch at a time to reveal more bruises covering her ribs and her hips. And although he didn't lift the fabric enough to see much of her stomach or back, he could tell that they bore marks of her training as well. Most of the bruises were indistinct in shape, the result of being slammed into the mat or absorbing the impact of his fist. But some of them bore the clear outline of his fingers from where he had gripped her hips and waist.

He slid the fabric back down her body and gazed at her serene face, and then he placed a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. "Hera" he said softly. "Hera, wake up." She furrowed her brow, shrugging at his hand and letting out a soft whine, so he bent down and slid one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her shoulders to lift her into his arms. She was warm and light, and her skin was silky, and he took his time walking to her room, telling himself that if he moved too quickly, he'd wake her. He laid her gently in her bed and covered her with a blanket. She sighed and rolled onto her side, and he turned to leave. "The feel of you in my arms," he whispered when he reached the hallway.

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Hera grew frustrated with Cato the next day. She found it too easy to dodge him as he charged her, and he seemed unusually slow to block her punches with strikes of his own. She found she could slip out of his hold effortlessly the few times he made any attempt to restrain her. "What's wrong?" she asked with irritation. "Why are you being soft with me today?"

Cato shrugged. "You've just been working really hard, and I don't wanna overdo it. I don't want you to get hurt before you go into the arena," he said.

Hera found this insulting. "I'm fine," she snapped. "Don't handle me with kid gloves." He chuckled at her attitude, and he hadn't meant to come off as patronizing, but it fanned her anger and she shoved him in the chest roughly. He laughed again, reaching out to grab her wrist with one hand and lift her shirt a few inches with the other.

"Oh please, I know about the bruises. I saw them last night," he said smilingly as she attempted to squirm out of his grasp. "Look at yourself. You could use a bre…" he broke off suddenly and stopped short although his grip on her didn't loosen. She turned her head to see him staring at her back, and the look on his face made her hair stand on end and her blood run cold. He had seen the scars. She squirmed again, but he continued to stare. "Who did this to you?" he asked, his voice quiet but intense, as though he was exerting all of his energy to keep it steady.

"I don't want to talk about it Cato."

"Was it your father?" he asked tightly, ignoring her protest, although it was clear he already knew the answer.

She squirmed again but it was useless and he only tightened his grip stubbornly. "I _said_ I don't want to talk about it. It doesn't matter. Now let go of me."

"HERA!" he snapped harshly. "ANSWER ME! WHO DID THIS TO YOU?"

But she could be stubborn too, and she set her features in a scowl and stared straight ahead of her. She went slack in Cato's grip, refusing to struggle anymore, determined to wait him out. He stared at her for a few moments, then let out his breath raggedly as he loosened his fingers ever so slightly. Hera wrenched her arm from his grasp and marched out of the training room without looking back.

Cato stood shaking with fury in the training room, clenching and unclenching his fists. So this was why she was able to remain stoic and unflinching as he pummeled her day after day; she was used to frequent beatings, used to hiding it from the people around her.

He wanted to find her father and hear the crunch of his bones as they broke beneath his hands. He wanted to jam a knife in the man's gullet and smell the iron as he watched him bleed out.

He lunged at the punching bag and whaled on it. It wasn't enough. He stormed into the apartment, kicking the door open and hurling the vase of flowers on the entrance table into the mirror above the fireplace. He stalked to the dining room table and swept the dishes onto the floor. He ripped the tv off the wall and overturned the couch, paying no heed to the petrified Avox who fled from the room.

He lifted the plush white footstool, preparing to send it flying into the chandelier, and that's when he saw the red stilettos, the ones Hera had stuffed under there two days ago after Trini had finished teaching her to walk in them.

All of Cato's anger rushed out of him as he remembered the beaming smile and sparkling eyes she had rewarded him with when he complimented her-it had felt like sunshine streaming through a window and onto his face. He dropped the footstool and sank to the floor with his head in his hands.

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She didn't come to dinner.

He found her on the roof, hugging her knees to her chest. He sat down beside her on the concrete and he didn't say a word. The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes, looking up at the night sky.

When she spoke, her voice was quiet and dispassionate.

"I used to hide under my bed or in the closet, but he'd find me and drag me out by my hair and beat me extra hard because having to find me just made him angrier. So I stopped hiding and just took it. He usually just punched or kicked me. He only used his belt sometimes. I think it must have been the days things had been really bad at work. I just remember being terrified when his hands went to his buckle."

"My house is right up against the forest, and one day when I was nine, I couldn't take it anymore. I ran away from him and into the woods. He saw me go in there, and he came looking for me, but he was too drunk to look up and realize I'd climbed a tree. I spent hours up there until I was certain he'd be passed out and it'd be safe to go back into the house." She laughed but it was a hollow sound. "I got really, _really_ good at climbing trees. I was hiding in one the night before the reaping."

She shivered and Cato glanced over at her to see goosebumps on her arms. He unzipped his hoodie and put it around her shoulders.

She was silent for a minute or so. "I've never talked to anyone about it until you...until now. I'm not stupid. I know everyone knew, but I just pretended they didn't."

Cato felt a lump in his throat. "Hera…" She turned to look at him. "Did he ever…" Cato didn't know how to finish his question.

"No," she said, understanding what he'd meant to ask. "He tried, but he was always too drunk to get it up." She laughed a little. "I guess that's the one good thing about his alcoholism."

Another minute passed. "I'm still a virgin," she said quietly. Cato didn't reply, and they were silent for a while.

"I don't remember anything from my games except killing that first boy." He hadn't meant to say the words out loud; they'd slipped out of their own accord.

"What do you mean you don't remember?"

"I mean I don't remember."

"Nothing?" she asked. "What about the gator? And fighting the District 1 guy at the end? What about that girl when you were...um…"

"...having sex? Nope, no memory. Not even the finale. I only know what I did cuz I watched the footage. I wanted to win the games so much. But I wasn't happy after I did. You know, you tell yourself you want something so bad, you put everything into it, and then you finally get it and it's not what you thought it would be. I just felt...like a monster. And lost. And... _empty_. And I try to, you know, do stuff to forget about it. I drink every night, have sex with any decent-looking woman who throws herself at me."

It felt so good to finally tell all of this to someone-like a weight slowly being lifted off of his chest-that he kept going.

"I have nightmares about that boy I killed-the first one, I mean. And on my victory tour I couldn't stand to look at the crowds. I knew they'd be accusing me and I knew they'd be right. And the families of the other tributes…I just wouldn't look at them. I started to think...that's when I first started to think about killing myself." Hera inhaled sharply and looked at him with compassion.

"I've never told anyone any of that either. Well, Brutus and Alec and all of them know I drink a lot and screw a bunch of girls. But they don't know that I don't remember my games, or that I have nightmares. Or that I think about hanging myself."

He fell silent and they both sat there for a few minutes without saying anything, and then he felt her hand close over his fist and his heart skipped a beat. She rubbed her thumb along his knuckles once, twice, and then stilled. He looked down at her small hand on his, then back up at the horizon, and he slowly opened his fist and turned it over to put his palm to hers. They sat staring straight ahead as the last rays of the sun faded.

"The way the concrete is still warm from the sun," she said a few minutes later, and he let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He splayed his free hand on the concrete beside him. It still held the heat from the sun's rays. They sat in silence a while longer.

Then the wind picked up and the sky to the south rumbled threateningly. She removed her hand from his and they both stood up. They didn't say a word to each other as they rode the elevator down to the seventh floor, or as he reached around her from behind to push the door to the apartment open for her. They didn't even say good-night to each other when they headed to their separate rooms. But they both lay in their beds for a long time before they fell asleep, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if the other one was thinking about them. Hera was still wearing his hoodie.

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The next morning Cato lingered in his room later than usual. He didn't know how to interact with Hera after last night. But eventually he forced himself to walk out to the dining room. Trini and Gianni were there with her, and they were almost done with their breakfast.

"There you are," said Trini cautiously, as though nervous he would fly off the handle again and flip the table over. He nodded curtly at her and Gianni, and then he sat down at the empty seat across from Hera. He shot a quick glance at her face, but she was engrossed in a conversation with Gianni about some of the potential sponsors she would meet at the gala in a few days. She broke off briefly when she felt his eyes on her and turned to him.

"I _almost_ ate all the bacon," she said teasingly. "But then I decided to be nice and save you some." She pushed the serving platter towards him and turned back to Gianni, leaving Cato to eat in peace.

"Listen," she said when he walked into the training facility a half hour later. "The gala is in three days and my outfit shows my shoulders and arms, and a little bit of my waist. Gianni gave me some cream for the bruises, but you were right yesterday about me needing a break. Let's go easy for the next few days."

He nodded, and then they jumped into training.

 _That you knew I'd feel awkward about last night so you're pretending it never happened,_ he thought.


	7. Chapter 7

She didn't even look at the knives at her scoring session with the gamemakers, let alone touch them. She shot some arrows and they snickered a little when she hit the edge of the target, and they snickered a lot when she didn't hit it at all. She scaled the climbing wall, but it took her a few minutes to do it, and they had stopped paying attention to her by the time she picked her way slowly back down.

Only Plutarch Heavensbee realized that every single one of her arrows had landed right where she'd meant them to, and that she had to force herself to slow down and appear to struggle on the climbing wall. He laughed to himself. Her cunning should earn her at least a 10.

"How did you do?" Cato asked as soon as she walked into the apartment.

" _Maybe_ a six," she said.

He nodded approvingly.

She got a five.

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"I see we have our fuck me pumps on," were the first words out of Cato's mouth when she walked into the living room five minutes before it was time to leave for the Sponsor Gala. He was sitting in one of the armchairs in a dark blue suit with his feet up on the ottoman, sipping on scotch. It was the first time she'd ever seen him in a suit in person, and he looked damn fine in it.

"Oh aren't you a funny one," she snapped at him. "How long have you been sitting out here waiting to say that?"

He just smirked and winked at her as he took another sip.

"Ugh. Gross," she said, rolling her eyes.

"Oh, now, don't you look lovely!" Trini exclaimed as she emerged from her room. "Turn around, let's get a look at you."

Hera spun obediently. Her sleeveless navy dress was made of a heavy, textured fabric, and had a short, full skirt. Gianni had designed it with a triangular cutout that ran across the front of her waist and tapered off at her ribs. Her hair was pulled up into a messy topknot, but her prep team had purposely left a few wisps out to fall carelessly on either side of her face, and they'd stained her lips with just a hint of red, so that it looked like she'd been eating strawberries. And, of course, she wore the red heels.

"Isn't she just lovely?" Trini asked Cato.

Cato decided he wouldn't have used the word _lovely_. He would have gone with _sexy_. The cutout in her dress exposed the hint of a six-pack beneath her velvety skin, and her lips looked pouty and just-bitten. He liked the wisps of hair around her face; they looked silky. And he thought her legs looked gorgeous in that dress and those shoes, although he thought they'd look even better wrapped around his waist.

But he didn't say any of that.

"My favorite part is the fuck me pumps," he said instead.

"Say one more word about my shoes," Hera warned as she slipped one of them off and held it up menacingly, "and I swear to god I will fuck _you_ in the eyes with the heels of them."

"Hera Greenleaf!" Trini exclaimed, horrified.

All Cato heard were the words "I will fuck _you_ ," strung together in a row and coming out of Hera's mouth, and his cock, which had started to twitch the moment he saw her in that dress, swelled into a full-blown hard-on. _Well that backfired_ , he thought.

"You'd better be ready to act like a lady by the time we arrive at the gala, young woman. Now come on, it's time for us to go down to the car," Trini said.

"I have to use the bathroom first," Cato said, angling his body to conceal his crotch as he stood up and walked towards his room.

He unzipped his pants and aimed his dick at the shower floor.

He thought about Hera, wearing nothing but the red heels, her legs wrapped around his waist. _Fuck me_ , she begged. _Please, Cato. Please fuck me._

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Cato abandoned her the second they got out of the car, but not before shooting her a brief look that she didn't quite understand. She thought maybe it was meant to be an apology for the way he was going to treat her that night-slightly annoyed but mostly neglectful, he had explained to her on the short drive there.

Hera discreetly studied the Careers as she sat in the holding room where they'd been told to wait until it was time for them to form the receiving line.

The District 1 girl, Glimmer, was a tall, beautiful, blond with ridiculously long eyelashes and a sparkling smile. Her voice was annoyingly high-pitched and breathy, and Hera could smell her sugary sweet perfume from the other side of the room.

Marvel, also from 1, seemed like a big, lovable goofball, which Hera found incredibly disconcerting considering what she knew of the Careers.

Clove, from 2, was a small, dark-haired girl no bigger than Hera, with a serious case of resting bitch face. Cato had told her that Clove's specialty was close-range combat with short spears. She was also highly skilled with the bow and arrow, but he'd reassured her that, from what he'd seen, even if her aim was precise, she lacked the hunting instincts to track Hera or find her up in the trees—a result of only training in the sterile, controlled environment of the Academy.

And of course, there was Clay. Tall, dark and handsome. Proud as a peacock. He was charming and witty, but Hera could sense the cruelty that lay just behind his devilish grin and his come-hither gaze.

She didn't think any of the non-Career tributes were particularly noteworthy-except for the pair from 11.

The boy, Thresh, was huge, even bigger than Cato. He had a fierce look in his eye, but he didn't have the streak of sadism that all of the Careers possessed. And his gaze softened every time it fell on his diminutive District partner.

Her name was Rue, and she was tiny, with dark brown eyes that appeared far-seeing, making her look wise beyond her years. Hera smiled warmly at her. "You look so pretty. And this dress is lovely," she said, taking a fold of the glittery gold netting that made up the bottom part of it between her fingers.

"I'm nervous," Rue whispered.

"Don't be," Hera said, brushing a wayward curl from her forehead.

"Can I stand next to you in line?" Rue asked shyly. In answer, Hera smiled again and held out her hand as the staff members told them it was time for them to take their places to meet the sponsors. She found herself standing between Glimmer and Thresh, and she placed her hands on Rue's shoulders as the little girl stood in front of her.

It was never-ending. It wasn't just sponsors who filed through the line, but bureaucrats, gamemakers, and past Victors.

At one point, she found herself able to take a break from smiling and acting cheerful, as the sponsor she'd just finished chatting with moved on to Glimmer. She closed her eyes to enjoy the small respite, but felt a hand on the small of her back and turned to see Thresh looking down at her warmly. _Thank you_ he mouthed to her, nodding toward Rue. He was handsome, with eyes that reminded Hera of melted chocolate and dimples that only appeared when he smiled. _No problem_ , she mouthed back, grinning, and glanced past him to see who the next person in line was.

It was Cato.

That suit... _fuck_ he was hot. She wanted him to push her up against the wall and manhandle her.

He was giving a perfunctory greeting to the tribute just on the other side of Thresh, but his eyes were on her, and they were narrowed. His glance moved from her, over to Thresh, down to Thresh's hand, which was still on her back, and up to her face again. He didn't look happy, which wasn't remarkable for him considering his reputation for being haughty and callous. But the look in his eyes right now wasn't either of those. His irises were like molten silver, shimmering with anger. It reminded her of the day he'd glared up at her as she tossed insults at him from her perch in the tree on the roof.

She kept her face neutral but blinked at him once, and narrowed her eyes at him the teeniest bit. _What?_

He seemed to recover himself and turned back to wish the tribute he was talking to luck in the Games, with a flat tone that said he clearly didn't give a shit about the kid.

"It's an honor, sir," Thresh said politely to Cato, removing his hand from Hera's back and holding it out to him.

"Mmm," he responded dismissively, shaking Thresh's hand and moving to stand in front of Hera.

"I see you're _enjoying_ getting to know the other tributes," he said, and though he made his voice sound lazy and disinterested, he put the slightest emphasis on the fourth word. He wouldn't meet her eyes, but kept his gaze on her forehead.

 _Is he jealous? No. No way. I'm just imagining it. This is how he normally acts in public, right?_ But Hera hoped he was at least the tiniest bit jealous, and if he was, she was going to milk it for all it was worth. After all, he'd just handed her her retort on a silver platter.

"Best company I've had in three months," she said nonchalantly. "Thresh and I were just discussing my shoes." She ignored the confused look on Thresh's face.

Cato's jaw clenched and the silver rose to the boiling point as his eyes met hers briefly before returning to her forehead.

"This is Rue," she said cheerfully, wrapping her arms around the little girl's shoulders and stifling the laugh that was threatening to bubble up from her throat at his reaction. "Rue, this is Cato. Have you ever met him before?"

"No," Rue whispered, pressing herself back into Hera's body and raising her eyes to the imposing man in front of her.

Cato wasn't sure why they called it seeing green; he was pretty sure it was red that had flashed in front of his eyes when he'd witnessed the exchange between the District 11 male and Hera. He managed to keep his jealous rage in check, though, and he softened a bit as he looked down at the little girl. "Hi," he said to her gently, if somewhat stiffly. He glanced back up at Hera, who gave him a look so subtle-eyes slightly widened, head moving just a touch forward-that no one else would have noticed that they were even communicating with one another, but Cato understood her, and she was clearly telling him to say something more to Rue. So he looked down again and gave her a small smile. "You look very lovely." She didn't thank him, but stared up at him with wide eyes, and Hera gave him an almost imperceptible nod of approval.

And then he moved onto the next tribute. Glimmer. _Perfect._ _Let's see if you can take it as well as you can give it_ , he thought to himself. He gave Glimmer his sexiest smirk and winked at her. "Well hello there," he said smoothly. The tall blond batted her lashes and stuck her chest out, and he bantered back and forth playfully with her for about 30 seconds before it was time to move on to the next tribute.

Hera was busy chatting with the woman who'd come behind him in line, but he could tell by the set of her features and the tilt of her head that she had observed his exchange with Glimmer from the corner of her eye, and something-was it the tightness of her smile, maybe?-told him that she just might be a little jealous too.

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Once he'd calmed down from the unanticipated distress the receiving line had caused him, Cato got down to the business of the evening.

He had a facade to keep up, and there were layers to it. He had to put on a show of at least trying to obtain sponsors for the tribute officially assigned to him to appease the Capitol, the gamemakers and President Snow. But he couldn't look like he was trying too hard, because he needed everyone from 2, and the tributes and mentors from the other districts for that matter, to think he didn't give a crap about Hera's welfare. In reality, however, he cared about her welfare more than anything, and so he did actually need to secure donations for her.

He knew that he'd get some gifts just because of who he was. But his usual sponsors-the ones who had donated all of the money they earmarked for the games each year to him and to Alec and then to Thea-would probably only be willing to give him a small percentage, choosing to support another career with the majority of their sponsorship money. In order to milk them as much as he could without giving away Hera's strengths, he decided to trade on her looks.

He chose to speak only with men, and particularly sought out both the indulgent elderly ones who had a soft spot for pretty young girls, and the notorious womanizers. All of his conversations sounded basically the same. "Look, she's a cute little thing, you can see that," he would say. "And I've been able to toughen her up some...I think she'll last a few days. But I'd hate to see her suffer, you know, from infection or dehydration. I'm hoping someone will just off her real quick when her time comes, but if they don't, I want to be able to send her food or water or medicine." If he was talking with one of the more perverted sponsors, he'd smirk and raise his eyebrows before tacking on "After all, I owe it to her after what she's done for me." It sickened him to talk about her like an object, but it meant more money for her, so he swallowed his nausea and put on a good show.

In the end, he came away with a sizable sum for her. Not enough to get her a set of throwing knives, of course, but enough to get her water or some medicine if she needed it.

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Cato's little exchange with Glimmer had Hera seething. She wanted to grab the twit by her hair and punch her in the face, but she kept her composure and pretended to be oblivious to the whole thing.

She had stepped outside onto a balcony a couple of hours later to get some air when she heard an appreciative whistle behind her. She turned to see Clay standing in the doorway, looking her over hungrily.

"Well, hello there 7. I've been trying to catch your eye all night. Cato told me you were sexy as hell, but he scarcely did you justice. Let's you and me form an alliance. We could start tonight if you want."

 _Why do today what you can put off til forever._ She bit back her retort. Cato had told her she needed to look weak to the other tributes, so she swallowed her pride and dropped her gaze timidly. Clay stepped out onto the balcony, invading her personal space. She made herself swallow hard and turn back to the railing. He chuckled and pressed his body against hers from behind, snaking an arm around the front of her to lay a hand on her stomach and run his thumb across the bare skin at her abdomen. _Thanks Gianni_ she thought sarcastically. _Literally left me open for that one_.

"Awww come on baby, don't be scared of me," he said, pressing his lips to her ear. "I'm not gonna hurt you. Well, that's not true, I'm actually gonna kill you, but I promise I'll do it quickly." He put his nose to her shoulder and inhaled her scent. She could feel his dick, hard against her lower back. "Mmmmm. Delicious." And then he pulled away from her, and she turned to watch him go. "I'll be coming for you, beautiful," he said with a wink before he slipped back into the party, and Hera didn't miss the double entendre.

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It was the end of the night.

Hera stood in the far corner of the room, talking with Lila Dunderhaven, the daughter of a high-up Capitol bureaucrat. Cato didn't know Lila all that well, but her dad had been one of his sponsors and he'd had sex with her a few times before she got married. He was surprised to see that her attitude toward Hera was genuinely friendly since she was usually catty towards other women. But Hera was holding Lila's six-month-old baby boy on her hip, fawning over him with delight as Lila chattered away to her about his feeding and sleeping habits.

As he came closer to the two women, he could see that the baby was just as enamored with his protege as she was with him. He cooed contentedly and nuzzled into Hera's neck as he splayed one hand on her breast and twined the fingers of his other around one of her loose strands of hair. His chubby little leg was pressed up against Hera's exposed midriff.

Cato found himself irrationally jealous for the second time that evening. _He_ wanted to nuzzle into her neck. _He_ wanted to comb through the fine tangles of her hair. _He_ wanted to brush his fingers across the bare skin of her stomach. But he couldn't. And here was this baby, doing all of that and rubbing it in his face.

But he wanted more than that, more than just to touch her. He had seen the warmth that she exuded as she loved on that baby. He'd been able to see it in the way she mothered the little girl from 11, even through his haze of jealousy towards Thresh. He'd been lucky enough to have that warmth focused on him a handful of times, and he wanted more of it. He wanted to be overtaken by it, wanted to drown in it. He wanted to roll into it, and open his lungs and breathe it in and die a happy man.

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"Hera. It's time to go," she heard Cato say. She handed the little guy back to his momma.

"It was so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for the advice," Lila said, hugging her. "And about our deal…" she whispered. "I promise."

"Thank you!" Hera said, and kissed Lila on the cheek.

"What was that about?" Cato asked her when she walked up to him.

"What was what about?"

"That whole hugging thing."

"We just really liked talking to each other," Hera said.

As they walked down the wide marble hallway, she saw Thresh and the two of them smiled at each other.

And then she felt Cato's hand pressed firmly, almost possessively, into the small of her back. She looked up at his face to see him glaring at Thresh. He kept his hand on her as they walked the rest of the way down the hall, and out into the cool night air, and even as he opened the car door and ushered her into the backseat.

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Hera was holding a baby just as she had been earlier in the evening. But this one was a girl and had dark eyes the color of the sea and tufts of blond hair, and when Cato looked at her he felt a stab of pride and tenderness so acute it was almost painful. He took the baby from Hera's arms and placed her in a bassinette in the corner of the bedroom. He leaned over to kiss her forehead, and then he crawled into bed to lay beside Hera. He tangled his fingers into her hair. He buried his face in her neck, where he could feel her warm pulse against his cheek and she let loose a low, throaty laugh as his breath tickled her skin. He moved his free hand gently onto her breast and she gasped as her back arched off the mattress and into his touch.

Cato sat up in bed, his forehead sweaty and his dick hard as a rock. He stared at the shards of moonlight that slipped through the blinds and onto the opposite wall as he tried to regain control of his breath, and then he pushed the blankets off and walked into his bathroom. He stepped into the shower, but he didn't turn the water on. Instead, he rested his forehead and the underside of his left forearm against the cool tile and pumped his cock furiously with his right hand. He pictured Hera writhing in his bed as he hovered over her, his fingers sliding in and out of her. He imagined her arching her back and moaning his name while she came around his hand, and as he emptied himself onto the floor of his shower for the second time that night, he let her name fall from his lips.

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"Don't even bother with the Cornucopia. Turn and run for cover as soon as it's time."

"But then I won't have anything. What about water?"

"You have sponsor money. I'll send water to you if you can't find any in the arena," he said.

"Ok."

"And Hera…"

"Yes?"

"If _anyone_ , and I mean _anyone_ , sees what you're capable of you _have_ to kill them. No mercy. Not for any of them, even the ones you like. We cannot risk word getting around to the other tributes that you're a threat. They have to underestimate you. Each and every one of them. Right up until the very end."

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She loved her interview dress. It was made out of a rich, dark red velvet. _Oxblood_ , Gianni had called the color. It was short, only coming to mid-thigh, and sleeveless with a full skirt. It was overlaid with lace just a shade lighter. They had piled her hair on top of her head loosely, as usual, and made her skin tan, so her legs and arms looked long and lean, and her shins and shoulders reflected the light. A single gold bangle gleamed richly in the light on her forearm. She wore delicate gold stilettos that showed off perfectly pedicured toes, and lipstick that matched her dress. She had been skeptical about it when she saw it in the tube, but once applied, it made her eyes look vivid and crystalline.

She was very proud of how graceful she was in her four-inch heels, and pranced around the living room in them. "I'm almost as tall as you," she said to Cato when he walked in. It was a ridiculous statement. He was well over six feet tall, and she couldn't be more than five seven in those shoes.

He just looked at her for a few seconds, almost as if he were in pain, and then strode right up to her until they were almost, but not quite, touching. Her eyes were level with his shirt collar, her forehead with his throat. His chin just cleared the top of her head by a centimeter. "Almost," he said huskily, and backed up a step.

Hera's heart pounded in her chest, and the spot between her legs started to throb.

Cato looked down at her perfect little feet, and, seized by an urge to kiss the arches of them, wondered when he'd developed a foot fetish.

Neither one noticed the glance that Gianni and Trini exchanged with one another.

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Hera bowed her head and shifted from foot to foot as she waited backstage for the interviews to start. Why they had to be at the studio an hour before they went live was beyond her.

She was so nervous that she wanted to throw up, and Cato had to keep up his show of indifference towards her, so he couldn't comfort her.

She scanned the hallway, looking for him, and found him all the way at the other end. He was joking around with Clay. She realized she'd never seen the two of them together before. Cato clapped the tribute on the shoulder and grinned wolfishly.

She turned and found Rue, and beckoned the little girl over to her. She adjusted the clasp on Rue's necklace, but continued to observe the two men at the end of the hall discreetly out of the corner of her eye.

They turned toward her and she could feel their eyes on her. And then they both burst out laughing. It was the ugliest sound she'd ever heard. A wave of violent fear seized her heart and shot through her arteries, all the way to the tips of her fingers and her toes.

When it receded, it left behind a coating of humiliation on her insides, a film of self-doubt.

She really had no right to get upset, she told herself. He'd never lied to her. He'd said from the beginning that his aim was to get her as far as possible in the Games, but not for her to win. He wanted Clay-or more accurately, his District, for he cared very little about people as individuals-to take the Victor's crown. District first. Personal glory second.

He had understood that building a friendly relationship with her would make her a more apt pupil, would help him keep his status as one of the best mentors. But he never grew attached to his tributes, and she was no different. He'd told her that after the night they watched his games.

Still it hurt. Like nothing she'd ever felt before. It hurt worse than her father's belt on her back.

But Hera would not show anger or self-pity. She would not cry.

There was no other option but to cauterize her heart to keep it from bleeding out. Like the doctors in 7 did when an axeman lost a limb in an accident.

When she looked up again, Cato had disappeared, and Clay was walking in her direction, to take his place in the lineup. As he passed her, he turned his head and winked at her. "Soon," he whispered. "Soon."

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They had decided to go for the "unremarkable" angle for her interview. It was really the only one that made any sense given their game plan.

"Caesar will ask you about why you volunteered and what it's like to be mentored by me, and before you know it your three minutes will be up," he had told her the day before.

She had rolled her eyes at his cocky assertion that the host would ask her about him, but after she finished the interview, she had to admit his prediction was spot-on.

There was only one question Cato hadn't prepared her for. Caesar asked her if she had found her mentor to be as attractive as all of the other women in Panem. Luckily, Hera had anticipated this. She had an answer prepared.

"Why do you think I only scored a 5? I was so busy staring at him I didn't retain anything he taught me," she said. The crowd roared with laughter.

 _God, your smart little mouth_ , Cato thought as he gazed at her with pride from backstage.

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He dreamt that she sat on his stomach, her knees on either side of him. She held a knife in her hand and she smiled down at him as she cut out his heart. He returned her smile and lifted his hand to touch her cheek, and he arched his back to allow her better access, to offer himself up to her.

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Just as dawn broke over the Capitol, Plutarch Heavensbee sat down at his desk and pulled up a real-time hologram of the arena. He was surveying the setup of the Cornucopia to make sure that it had been done correctly, to his specifications.

"Perfect," he whispered to himself when he saw the brown backpack that had been placed near Plate 17.

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"It's time," said the Peacekeeper.

 _One hour. I could be dead in one hour._

They rode the elevator up to the hoverpad in silence. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. His head was bowed, his eyes fixed on the ground.

When the doors opened, they stepped out into the sunlight and turned to face one another.

His stare was so intense it felt like his eyes were burning holes through hers, right down into her soul.

"Ma'am it's time for you to board," said the Peacekeeper, placing a hand on her elbow and tugging lightly.

"Just a minute," Cato answered for her without looking away from her face.

He didn't stop staring. She couldn't tear her eyes away from his.

The Peacekeeper tugged at her elbow a little more forcefully. "Ma'am," he said impatiently.

"I SAID JUST A MINUTE!" he roared, and shoved the man into the elevator doors.

He turned back to her, his eyes wild. Without thinking, she put her hand to his cheek to try to calm him. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Then he turned his face and nuzzled into her palm for just a second before he let out a strangled sound and turned abruptly away from her to jam his finger into the elevator button. The Peacekeeper took her by the elbow again, more tentatively this time, and she gave Cato's back one long look before she turned and walked toward the hovercraft. As she ascended the ramp she looked over her shoulder, but he was already gone.


	8. Chapter 8

Gianni had laid out her clothes for the arena, and Hera surveyed them. Black boy shorts, black bra, black socks. Olive green cargo pants, black leather belt. Gray v-neck t-shirt, black hooded windbreaker. Black boots.

"I'm guessing mountains or woods," he said. " _Maybe_ desert. But they just did that a couple years ago so…"

She had begun to shake with fear while he helped her dress. He hugged her tightly, trying to soothe her by running his hands up and down her arms.

"Look honey, you can do this. Just be strategic about when you lay low and when you bust it out. Remember what Cato told you."

The 30 second warning sounded, and Hera started to panic.

"What if I don't get any knives?" she whispered.

"Cato is gonna work his ass off to get more money so he can get you at least one. Lay low until you get it."

"But if I see one at the Cornucopia…"

"NO!" Gianni said. "If you listen to nothing else that man has told you, listen to him about the Cornucopia."

Then there were 20 seconds left and Gianni was helping her into the tube and Hera realized she could literally be dead within two minutes. She felt a sob rise up in her chest.

And then Gianni said "It will be alright, Hera. Just pretend you're running from your father." She didn't even stop to wonder whether Gianni had made an educated guess about her scars or if Cato had told him, because it didn't really matter. As fucked up as it seemed, Gianni had just said the most comforting thing anyone could have at that moment. He had taken the unknown and turned it into the familiar. _You silly things_ , she'd told the Callahan children. _Don't you know I've survived my father all these years? I'll survive the games_. The sob died in the back of her throat. She steeled her spine and nodded resolutely.

And then the tube sealed itself and she felt herself ascending.

50 seconds. The sunlight blinded her, and at first she couldn't see anything. As her eyes adjusted, she felt a surge of hope. They had been deposited in a clearing surrounded by trees. Trees that looked just like the ones back home in 7.

38 was a lake to her right. She didn't waste her time looking at the Cornucopia, but directly in front of her, about 10 feet away, was a brown backpack.

31 seconds. She looked at the tributes on either side of her, the only potential competition for the bag. Neither were Careers. She was guessing she could take them. It was worth the risk.

18 seconds. A few pedestals to her right she saw Rue. The little girl looked like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered. Hera caught her eye and jerked her head towards the woods. _Run,_ she mouthed. Rue swallowed and nodded.

11 seconds. Julian was almost directly across from her so she couldn't read the expression on his face. He seemed to be transfixed on something metal that lay near him. A sword, or maybe a saber, she wasn't sure.

6 seconds. She looked at the backpack again and then up at the holograph countdown.

5.

4.

3.

2.

1.

Hera leapt off the plate and snatched the backpack, turning and shoving the boy who had been standing to her right out of the way. Then she fled for the woods without looking back, just as she had fled from her father hundreds of times.

She ran for maybe a mile before she stopped. Then she opened her backpack and peeked in. Bottles of water. Good. That was all she needed to know. She could run a couple more miles if she had water. She'd examine the rest of the contents later.

She stopped running half an hour later and chose a tree. She scaled it in no time and settled herself into the foliage about forty feet up. She opened her backpack again as she consciously worked to slow her breath. 6 bottles of water, a nylon rope, and a bottle of water purification pills.

There was no knife, but that would have been too good to be true. She was grateful for what she had now.

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"Well, fuck. There went the last three months of my life," Johanna said, rolling her eyes. Both of the District 10 tributes and Julian had been killed at the bloodbath. She got up and walked out of the room.

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"You're dismissed," Johanna said as she walked into the District 7 mentoring room. "Go back to sipping scotch and chasing snatch."

Cato just turned to look at her. He was white as a ghost. He looked almost ill. Johanna stopped short. She'd never seen him look like that. "What's wrong?" she asked. He didn't answer, just turned back to the screen.

"He's a little stressed right now," Trini whispered.

"About what?"

"She was supposed to just run from the Cornucopia. She almost gave him a heart attack when she went for that backpack. But it's really not a big deal. No harm done."

"She could have been killed," he growled.

"Yes, well if she opens that backpack and there's a knife in there, you won't be so quick to condemn her, will you?" Gianni said.

 _Wait, they know about her knives?_ Johanna thought.

Hera squirreled up a tree a short while later, and Johanna felt her mouth drop open. Where had she learned to do that? She looked at her three companions, and none of them seemed the least bit surprised. Cato looked a little relieved.

"No knife," he muttered after she examined her backpack. He looked down at his supply price sheet and back up at the screen, rubbing a hand across his forehead. And then he stood up and kicked a chair without warning, sending it flying across the room. "GODDAMMIT!"

 _He trained her. He fucking trained her._

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It was actually boring. But, paradoxically, boring was scary because it meant waiting. Waiting and thinking.

Hera felt a little sad when she saw Julian's face in the sky the first night. But mostly she felt relieved for him. He was at peace, not suffering, not in pain, and not in fear.

She sat high up in the trees for five full days after that first one, cold enough to shiver uncontrollably all through the night, but not cold enough to die of hypothermia. Cato didn't send her a sleeping bag, and she knew it was because he was trying to reserve her donations for when she was truly in need of food or medicine. He didn't care if she was comfortable. He cared that she survived until Clay got to her.

It warmed up during the daytime, so that was when she slept, tied to a branch high up in the air, concealed among the leaves.

She only came down to the forest floor to forage for food or to replenish her water supply at the stream, and even then, she only needed to do that twice, once five of her six water bottles were empty. She'd climb to the very top of one of the taller trees to ensure that no other tributes were within easy range of her, and then she'd slip down to the ground. She'd gather enough berries, apples and groundnuts to keep herself decently fed, fill up her water bottles, and dart back up into the trees.

She didn't want to lose her edge from sitting all the time, so she monkeyed around in the branches for at least a few hours a day, playing a game with herself to see how graceful and stealthy she could be. And sometimes, when she was sure she was a safe distance from the other tributes, she would snap little twigs from the branches and pretend they were knives, flicking her wrist to try to hit some spot she chose at random to serve as her target.

She thought about Rue a lot. She wanted to try to find her, but she knew it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. She hadn't seen which way they girl had run at the Cornucopia. She only knew that she was still alive.

She shuddered whenever she heard the cannon go off.

At night, she would watch the faces of the dead play across the sky, feeling that, rather than increasing her chances of survival, each fallen tribute brought her closer to danger, closer to open conflict. For Hera, this was the calm before the storm.

A couple of times a day a tribute would pass by, close enough for her to see the top of their head or hear their footsteps. And once, the troop of Careers passed directly beneath her, bantering back and forth with one another, too cocky to worry about anyone hearing them. She felt a stab of fear, but they disappeared from her view within seconds, and after five minutes she couldn't hear them laughing anymore.

And then, on the evening of the sixth day, after the anthem had played, she ticked off who was left on her fingers. Clay. Clove. Marvel. Glimmer. Rue. Thresh. Hera.

She heard the wind rustle through the leaves. _Soon_ it whispered to her. _Soon_.

 _I'll be coming for you, beautiful._

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She heard them just before she saw them. She was getting her daily exercise, climbing around in the branches, and she was only about seven feet off the ground when she heard the sound of two sets of footsteps sprinting over the ground. She froze as Rue came into view, literally running for her life, followed closely by that bitch from 1. Her heart dropped. She felt sick.

"It's no use, little rat!" Glimmer called gleefully. "Your time has come. Just lay down and roll over and give in to the inevitable!"

Hera felt powerless. She didn't have any weapons. The only thing she had was the nylon rope, and that was 20 feet above her in her backpack. She'd never get to it in time to help Rue.

Rue reminded her of herself six years ago, an innocent child fleeing through the forest in terror.

And Glimmer….Glimmer reminded her of her father, knife in hand as she hunted Rue, smirking and taunting the little girl just as he had when he'd stalked towards her with his… _belt_.

As she slipped her belt from her hips, she could hear Cato's voice in her head.

 _Don't strain against it, you'll choke yourself out._

Glimmer never saw it coming.

Hera leapt from the bottom branch and looped her belt around Glimmer's neck in one swift movement. The instant her feet touched the ground, she slammed her forehead into the back of the other girl's skull, causing her to fall forward so that the combination of gravity and Glimmer's own body weight forced her into the stranglehold. As she hit the ground, Hera dug a knee into her back, crossed the ends of the belt over each other, and pulled as hard as she could. Glimmer flailed wildly, striking out with the knife, but Hera held on as though her life depended on it. She didn't resist when Glimmer rolled both of them over so that the Career lay on her back on top of her. She wrapped her legs around Glimmer's torso, and this allowed her to brace herself and pull even harder. She registered pain somewhere in her body, and blood had started to flow into one of her eyes, but she didn't care. She could tell that Glimmer was trying to slam the back of her head into her nose, but every time she attempted to lift her head up to gain enough momentum to do it, she only strained against the belt even more. The struggle seemed interminable to Hera, but in reality it took less than a minute for Glimmer to go limp. She didn't loosen her grip until she heard the cannon signal the death of the District 1 tribute.

She crawled out from under Glimmer's body, wiping the blood from her eye, and threaded the belt back through her pants. Then she leaned down and snatched the knife from the ground where Glimmer had dropped it when she lost consciousness.

"Rue," she called softly. There was a rustle from a nearby tree, and Rue poked her head out from behind the leaves. "It's ok. She's dead. You can come down now, I'm not gonna hurt you."

Rue considered her for a moment, and then scrambled to the ground and took a few tentative steps toward Hera. "You're bleeding," she said. Hera wiped the blood from her eye again. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, she realized that her left side and the inside of one of her thighs hurt. She looked down to see blood seeping through her clothing in both locations where Glimmer's knife had obviously made contact as she struck out wildly during the struggle.

"So it seems." She took off her jacket and pulled her shirt up part of the way to inspect the two-inch gash on her ribs. It didn't look too bad, but it needed to be cleaned so it wouldn't get infected, and ideally, it needed to be stitched up. She peered through the tear in her pants to find a smaller but deeper gash in her left thigh. "How's this one look?" she asked Rue, pointing to her right temple; it didn't hurt as much as the other two.

The little girl seemed to have decided to trust her, and came right up to take a close look at it. "It's just a scratch, really. Not too bad," she said.

"Come on, we need to get away from here before the hovercraft arrives and gives our location away." Hera retrieved her backpack from her tree.

When she climbed back down, she took a good look at Rue. She was in good shape, and she had a backpack of her own, in spite of the fact that she had fled the bloodbath immediately. _You kept your promise,_ Hera mentally said to Lila Dunderhaven. _Thank you_.

Rue told her that Glimmer also had a backpack at some point, but must have dropped it during the chase. Hera found it a few yards from her tree, but she didn't pause to inspect its contents. Her cuts weren't bleeding enough to need immediate attention, and she wanted to get as far away as possible before someone else found them. The two girls took off at a decent pace, and stopped a couple of miles away when they found a suitable tree to shelter them for the time being.

"Doesn't it hurt to walk?" Rue asked when they'd walked for about a mile.

"A little bit, but it's not too bad," she said. _Actually, it hurts like a motherfucker, but I refuse to give these Capitol dicks the satisfaction of seeing me limp_.

Once she'd settled herself onto a solid branch about 30 feet off the ground, she set about taking care of her injuries. The leg wound was bleeding the most, so she used a wad of fabric she tore from her jacket to apply pressure to it while Rue opened Glimmer's backpack. There were a few bottles of water, some beef jerky, dried apricots, and another rope.

"How many tributes have you killed so far?" Rue asked her.

"Just her." Hera was unnerved. She was trying to dissociate herself from the events of earlier, and Rue's question forced her to verbally acknowledge what she'd just done to another human being. She pushed her guilt down. _You don't have time for that right now_ , she told herself. _You have a little girl to look after_.

"Really?" Rue looked surprised. "Why did you help me? You could have just stayed up there and she never would have seen you."

"You're the same age as the little girl I take care of back in 7."

"The one you volunteered for?"

"Yes."

"What's her name?"

"Tara."

Rue looked like she wanted to ask more on the subject, but they both cocked their heads when they heard the delicate chimes that signaled a sponsor gift. The silver parachute floated down about a foot from Hera a few seconds later, and she reached out a hand to pluck it from the air. Its silver capsule bore a 7 on the lid, and contained antiseptic pads, square bandages large enough to cover her cuts, two sealed packets containing sterilized needles and thread, and a round tin of potent Capitol medicine.

"Thank you," she said quietly, leaning her head back against the trunk.

"What does your note say?" Rue asked.

Hera rummaged through the tin again to find the note that usually accompanied a sponsor gift, but she came up empty-handed. "There isn't one."

"Really?" Rue looked confused.

"I'm not surprised. Cato's not a man of many words."

"What's he like?" Rue asked curiously.

Hera shrugged. She didn't really want to talk about Cato.

"He seems mean and scary," the little girl persisted.

"Well he's not really that mean, or at least not as mean as he looks on tv."

"Is he scary?"

"Sometimes." She lifted the wad of fabric from her thigh and found that the bleeding had slowed down dramatically. "Time for me to stitch this up. Why don't you tell me about life back in 11?"

"You're gonna stitch yourself up?" the little girl asked incredulously. "Where did you learn to do that?"

Hera grinned. "I practiced on raw chickens the Avoxes brought me. Now tell me about life in 11."

While Rue chattered on happily about birds and orchards and her friends at school, Hera mentally prepared herself for the fact that she was going to have to take her pants off on national television. _Thank god for the boy shorts_. She slipped her boots off and then unbuckled her belt. She briefly considered leaving one leg of her pants on, but once Panem had seen the bottom of one ass cheek, did it really matter if they saw the other? And on the practical side of things, should another tribute stumble across them, it would be easier to defend herself with no pants on than waste time trying to scramble back into the other leg. So off went the pants.

She rinsed the wound with a little water from her canteen, wiped it down with an antiseptic pad, and set to work stitching it up. It hurt, but she set her jaw and powered through it with no other show of weakness. Then she applied the Capitol medicine and bandaged it up before putting her pants back on.

 _One down, one to go_. She hung her jacket from a neighboring branch and held the hem of her t shirt up with her teeth while she tended to the cut on her side. She knew she was exposing one black-fabric-clad breast and some cleavage to the nation, but she was over it by now. It was a little more difficult to get a good angle as she stitched this cut up, but she managed to get the job done.

The scratch by her eye only needed to be cleaned, and then the girls ate an early evening meal of groundnuts and berries. As the sun started to set, they secured themselves in their branches with rope for the night, Rue resting in one just below and to the right of Hera's perch.

"What do you miss most?" she asked Hera after the anthem had played and Glimmer's face had faded from the sky.

Hera thought about it for a minute, glad to be distracted from the new wave of guilt the sight of Glimmer's face had brought on. _The sound of ice clinking in his glass. His fingers adjusting mine on the bow. When I make him smile. When his hands linger for a second on my hips after he's pinned me_. "Holding Tara's baby sister Mia. What do you miss most?"

"Peach pie...and my mom singing me lullabies. Did you ever sing to Mia?"

"Yes."

"Will you sing me to sleep?"

Hera had never sung in public, only to Mia and the other Callahan children, and she dreaded the idea of singing to the entire nation. But she didn't have the heart to deny Rue this comfort. So she placed her hand on top of Rue's head and smoothed her springy curls back, closed her eyes, and sang lullabies softly until she heard the little girl's breath slow itself and even out.


	9. Chapter 9

Cato was unraveling.

He had been working on securing one final donation for Hera-one that would enable him to send her a knife-when Johanna yelled at him to get back into the room because Glimmer and Rue were getting close to her.

When he first realized that they were going to pass under Hera's tree, he hoped she'd have the sense to just stay hidden. But no, of course she didn't.

He could see the wheels turning in her head, and he knew what was going on in that brain of hers. "No no no no no," he said to the screen."Don't even think about it. Don't even think about it. Don't...fuuuuuck!" he yelled as she leapt from the tree.

"Choke her Hera! Choke that bitch! Don't let go!" He threw his water glass at the wall beside the screen as Glimmer's knife pierced Hera's thigh, and then he ripped Johanna's glass from her hand and spiked it onto the floor.

Hera had had the upperhand from the beginning, but as Glimmer struggled desperately to try to break his tribute's nose with the back of her head, it became obvious that there was no way she was going to win this one, and Cato's tone changed. "Yeah! Get it girl! Get it!" he yelled, kicking a large shard of crystal from Johanna's glass into the wall.

And then it was over and he dropped back into his chair in relief. "Oh you idiot," he muttered, staring at Hera as she climbed out from under Glimmer's body. "Ohhhh, I hate you. I hate you. I'm gonna wring your fucking neck if you make it out of there. You scared the SHIT out of me."

He dropped his head into his hands and sat there shaking for half a minute. When he looked up Johanna was staring at him with her mouth hanging open.

"What?!" he snapped.

"Who are you and what have you done with that asshole who won the 70th games?" she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

He sighed and turned back to the screen, watching Hera do a quick assessment of her injuries. Then he looked back and forth between his list of sponsor donations for Hera and his supply price sheet. He appeared to be doing some calculations. When he was finished, he stood abruptly and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" Johanna called after him.

"To Seneca to place an order for a sponsor gift," he called back over his shoulder. "Keep an eye on her and come get me if anything happens."

While he was gone, Johanna watched Hera lead Rue further into the forest and wondered what the hell had gotten into Cato. She had only ever seen four sides to him: there was bored Cato, contemptuous Cato, smug Cato, and the emotionless sociopath who had slaughtered eight tributes four years ago. She'd watched him over the past few years as he mentored. He had never really gotten worked up, chuckling mirthlessly when Alec won, and rolling his eyes and sighing when Thea was killed. To her knowledge, he had never yelled at his tributes through the screen, never jumped out of his seat or thrown things. And she had never seen him shake, first in terror for his tribute's safety, and then in relief.

When he returned, Johanna studied him closely.

He smiled as Hera opened her sponsor gift. A warm, genuine smile that reached his eyes.

He seemed dismayed when she told Rue there was no note in her gift. "I didn't know what to say," he said said in exasperation as if she could hear him. "I just wanted to get it to you as fast as possible."

His face took on a look of tender pride as she stitched herself up without wincing. "That's my girl," he murmured. "That's my girl."

And when she opened her mouth and sang to Rue in a low, sweet voice that made Johanna think of honey, he stared at Hera in wonder, eyes shining, mouth open, the hair on his arms standing straight up.

 _Well I'll be a monkey's left nut_ , Johanna thought to herself. _He's in love with her_.

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The first half of the next day was uneventful. Clove and Clay were making plans to hunt down Thresh, arguing over which would get the honor of killing him. They'd seen him refilling his canteen at the lake the evening before and they'd chased him, but he'd run into a grassy field on the eastern side of the arena before they could get to him, so they'd decided to wait until the next day to track him down.

Marvel was rolling his eyes as they argued, and making snares to try to catch Hera and Rue. No one had any idea where they were. When the cannon had gone off the previous afternoon they'd all grinned at each other. Glimmer had gone off hunting by herself, and they figured she'd caught and killed 7 or 11. They were surprised when she failed to return to the Cornucopia by sundown, and astonished when her face appeared in the sky.

"Well, she wasn't the brightest crayon in the box," Clove said. "She probably fell off of a cliff or something."

"Or maybe she ran into some kind of mutt," Marvel said. "Or there's always Thresh...but she went west and he's been hanging out to the east, so it's unlikely."

They didn't even consider the possibility that Hera had killed her.

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The girls were napping the afternoon away and the remaining tributes were nowhere near them, so Cato stepped out into the lobby to take a break and stretch his limbs.

"Well look who it is," he heard Brutus say. "I was just coming to tell you how impressed I am with what you've managed to do with that girl. Not gonna lie, I thought she'd be killed in the first hour, but she's a scrappy little thing, isn't she?"

Cato gave him a sly smile.

"I should have figured it out before, you sneaky son of a bitch, you. You're too egotistical to just let your stats plummet. Now that idiot over there…." He jerked his head towards Alec, who was talking with Lars. "She probably won't make it much longer though, will she?"

The question made Cato sick to his stomach, but he forced himself to keep playing the game. "Probably not. I think she has a chance against Clove or Marvel. It's unlikely, but it's possible."

"Dude, so...your tribute," Alec cut in, coming over to the two of them.

"What about her?"

"She looked cute in those dresses, but when she was stitching herself up. Whew! That _ass_. Those _tits._ I totally get why you decided to train her. Wish she hadn't worn that sweater to her reaping. If I'd have seen what was under there I would have taken her instead of the boy. I'd have had a hell of a lot more fun the last few months. How is she man?"

Cato felt his rage start to surface. He pushed it back down. "Wouldn't know," he said curtly.

" _What?_! No fucking way." Alec looked at him incredulously. Cato shrugged. "You get bitches to drop their panties for you every night with one look. I've seen it with my own eyes. And you had three months with this girl and you never got inside it?"

"I was a little busy."

"With _what_?"

"Um, the games."

"They never stopped you before. All of Panem saw you bang that bitch from 1 back during your year. And I know for a fact you got with Thea before she went in. What's the matter man? Losing your touch with the ladies? Cuz I sure as hell woulda hit that shit. I'd have rammed my dick so far up her ass-" but he didn't get any further, because Cato shoved him into the wall as hard as he could.

"What the fuck man?!" Alec shouted, shoving him back.

Brutus and Lars broke it up within seconds, but not before Cato gave Alec a black eye, and Alec had busted Cato's lip open.

Brutus cuffed Alec by the back of the neck and shook him. "Don't be a dick Alec," he said as he led him away. "You don't fucking mess with a guy while he's in the middle of mentoring. It's stressful enough as it is."

"You good, man?" Lars asked Cato, letting go of his hold on his shoulders.

"Yeah," Cato said, wiping the blood from his mouth, but he was still shaking with anger as he turned to go back into his mentoring room. Johanna was eyeing him curiously. She'd witnessed the entire exchange through the open doorway. He ignored her and sat back down to monitor Hera's situation.

"Here," he heard Johanna say, and she plopped a napkin filled with ice and a glass of whiskey down in front of him.

"No. No alcohol," he said to her, pointing to the screen and putting the ice to his lip.

"One drink isn't gonna cloud your judgement. It'll just calm your nerves. Besides, she's sleeping up in a tree. No one's gonna find her. What can happen?"

Cato sighed and took a sip.

"Now tell me," Johanna said. "Did you go after Alec because he questioned your sexual prowess or because of what he said he'd do to Hera?"

Cato didn't say anything and took another sip of whiskey, his eyes glued to the screen.

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Now that it was down to the final 6, they were starting to show interviews with the remaining tributes' loved ones on tv.

They played the District 7 segment about an hour after Cato's run-in with Alec.

They didn't interview her father, but that didn't surprise Cato. They interviewed Uma first, and then the three older Callahan children. It was clear that they all adored her, and missed her, and wanted her to come home to them. None of this surprised him either.

Their final interview, however, knocked the wind out of him.

Of course the children had a father...Cato had known that. But she had never really mentioned him.

His name was Dean and he was around 30 years old. Cato had to admit, begrudgingly, that he was a good-looking guy. Tall. Strong. Lean. Handsome face.

He was a logger, Cato learned. He was quiet, reserved, polite, respectful.

But when he spoke about Hera, it was as if he were a priest speaking about his deity. This really wasn't all that remarkable in itself, given the circumstances. After all, Hera had put her own life at risk to save that of his firstborn. But Cato knew a man in love, and this man, this Dean...he was in love with Hera. _It takes one to know one_ , Cato thought bitterly, as the now-familiar sensation of jealousy rose up in the back of his throat and pooled into the space behind his eyes.

"And what is she to you, Mr. Callahan?" the reporter asked.

The logger shook his head and looked off into the distance. "She's become the mother of my children. She's become...I mean...It was her last reaping." He looked down at his hands in his lap, his palms rough with callouses, his cuticles stained with dirt. "I was gonna ask her to marry me that day. After it was all over."

The reporter paused for dramatic effect, let the silence stretch, and then finally asked one last question. "And if she wins...what then?"

"Then I hope she'll become my wife."

 _Lots of them_ , she'd said when he'd asked her if she wanted kids. _I would have made a good mother_. He understood now. She'd been talking about these four children. She'd known this man was going to ask her to marry him. She would have said yes if she hadn't been reaped. If she lived, she would return to her district. She would marry the logger. She would raise his children.

The second this thought hit home, the room in which Cato sat became a vacuum. The air was sucked from his lungs. His eyes from his sockets. The sound from his ears. His organs rose up into his chest, and out through his mouth. His skin was ripped from his muscles, his muscles from his bones. His brain, trapped inside his head, had suctioned itself to the top of his skull, and it began to swell until it exploded, and then it, too, was sucked from the sockets where his eyes had once been.

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"Cato…..Cato….Cato!"

Johanna was shaking him.

Slowly, his eyes began to register color and light again, although the hues were dull and muted. Sound began to return to his ears, but it was indistinct, as if he were underwater.

"Jesus man, what the hell happened?" she asked him.

A little brighter, the colors. A little clearer, the sounds. _Get it together. Focus. For her. She's still in there. Forget about that guy, forget about it. Deal with it later._

"Huh?" he looked up at Johanna. She was studying him shrewdly.

"Good. You went catatonic on me for a couple minutes there."

"Sorry. Haven't exactly been getting much sleep….Maybe Alec hit me harder than I thought….The alcohol probably didn't help."

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The arena was warm and sunny, and they spent the day after Hera killed Glimmer alternating between sleeping and talking.

Rue had gotten a sponsor gift every day, so she had lots of little treats in her backpack. Bread and oranges and little cheeses wrapped in red wax. She'd even gotten soup a couple of times, she told Hera, as she split a roll and handed half to her. "And I had a sleeping bag," she said, "but I had to leave it behind when I ran from that girl from 1."

"We could go get it," Hera said. Last night had been relatively warm, but who knew what tonight would bring. She didn't like the idea of Rue being cold and she refused to build a fire unless she had no other choice.

"I don't remember which direction I came from," Rue told her. "I was so scared and I ran for so long from her. I wouldn't even know where to begin looking."

They were quiet for a while. And then Rue spoke again. "I got a lot of sponsors. My mentor was surprised." There was a sly look in her eyes, and an affected offhandedness to her voice.

"Who's your mentor again?" Hera wanted to change to subject.

"Finnick Odair."

Oh, yes. Finnick Odair. The Capitol women loved him almost as much as they loved Cato. Finnick was the charmer, the smooth talker. A perfect contrast to Cato's bad boy allure.

"Did he help you?"

"Yeah. He taught me to climb. And hide. He was really worried after the Sponsor Gala that I wouldn't get a lot of donations. He seemed kinda mad at himself and said he should have tried harder. But then he laughed when he saw my list." There was that tone again.

 _She really likes to talk about this sponsorship thing, doesn't she?_ "Did he tell you about the ocean and District 4?"

"Yeah," Rue said.

"What did he say? I really want to see it some day." This time she succeeded in changing the subject, and the topic didn't come up again.

They were eating their dinner when the cannon went off twice in the space of a minute. The two girls looked at each other with wide eyes.

"Who do you think it was?" Rue asked.

"Not sure." Hera hoped one of them had signaled Clay's death, but she had a bad feeling that wasn't the case.

"I hope it wasn't Thresh," Rue said. Hera smiled at her sadly. She thought about trying to reassure the girl that it wasn't, but that just seemed like a ridiculous thing to do at this point.

They held their breath as they sat next to each other in the branches when the sky turned dark and the anthem played. Clove's face appeared and Hera was about to let out a sigh of relief. But the next face was Thresh's. She heard Rue sniffle next to her. "I'm sorry sweetie," she whispered as she put her arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

When Rue had cried herself out, Hera told her it was time for them to tie themselves in, and then she sang her companion to sleep. It took her a while tonight.

She sat and looked up at the moon as Rue slept. It was just the two of them and Marvel and Clay left. The thought made her shudder with fear. What was she going to do? What should her next move be? Should she keep hiding out or should she attack head-on? If she did attack, she didn't stand a chance against both of them at once. She'd have to find a way to split them up. But how? Maybe, if she was lucky, one of them would kill the other and then she'd only have to worry about dealing with a single threat, rather than a double one. She doubted it though.

 _Find a way to split them up, Hera. Kill Marvel. Kill Clay. Then slit your throat. Send Rue home._

She leaned her head back into the trunk and she thought about Thresh, with his dimples and his kind eyes.

But she didn't cry for him.

 _I'll see you soon buddy._

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The night had been cold. They'd both woken up in the middle of it, shivering and unable to go back to sleep.

"Are you sure you don't remember which direction you ran from?" Hera asked her in the morning.

"No idea," Rue said.

"Well, let's go back to where I was when Glimmer was chasing you. Maybe that will jog your memory a little. We're gonna run out of water soon anyway, and there's a stream right near there. Come on. It's only a few miles south of here."

"You stay back here," she instructed the girl when they were about a hundred yards from the stream. She didn't like how open the ground was on its banks, and she knew that Marvel and Clay would be scouting out places near water. "I'll fill the bottles."

She hadn't even finished filling the first one when she heard Rue scream her name. She dropped the bottles and sprinted towards the sound. And there was Rue, in a small clearing, with her ankle caught in a snare. She was tugging at her leg frantically, trying to escape.

"It's ok, it's ok! Rue, calm down," Hera tried to soothe as she pulled out her knife from her pocket. "Just sit still and I'll cut you fr-" But she never finished her sentence, because she heard a soft whoosh in her left ear, just before the spear embedded itself in Rue's chest.

Automatically and without thought, Hera whipped around and sent her knife sailing into Marvel's left eye.

"Rue!" she cried, turning just in time to see the little girl pull the spear from her body. "Rue, no! Leave it in! You'll bleed out!"

It was a foolish thought. That Rue could somehow survive the rest of the games with a spear in her chest. But Hera was desperate. She pulled off her jacket and pressed it to the wound as she helped the little girl lay down. "Maybe we can...maybe we can...if I can just stop the bleeding."

Rue's tiny hands came up to grasp Hera's wrists and pull them away. "It's no use," she whispered. She was right. Hera's hands were covered in blood. The jacket was soaked through. Rue slipped one of her hands in Hera's and let out a raspy breath.

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," Hera repeated, over and over again, smoothing Rue's hair back with her free hand.

"I know what you did for me," Rue whispered. "I saw you at that party. Talking to all of those women with babies and little kids. Finnick showed me my list of sponsors the night before they put us in here, and it was all of them. Those women. You got them to sponsor me."

Hera was going to lose it. "It wasn't enough," she wailed. "It wasn't…"

"You have to win," Rue cut her off, her voice rapidly growing weaker. "You have to win for Tara."

Hera couldn't hold her tears back anymore. They were starting to spill from her eyes.

"Will you sing me to sleep?" she heard Rue ask.

 _Just hold it together a little longer, Hera. Just long enough to sing for her_. She wiped the tears from her eyes, and she smiled down at the little girl, and she started to sing.

Rue's eyes went dark and her breath ceased before she had finished the second verse of her lullaby.

Hera put her fingers to the girl's throat. There was no pulse. She shut her eyes gently, and she leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

She sat back on her knees with her head in her hands in silence for a few minutes. And then she stood up and walked away, blindly, into the forest. She heard the whirr of the hovercraft as it came to fetch the two bodies, but she didn't turn around. She just kept walking.

 _I'm going to kill myself_ , she thought, forgetting about Rue's request that she win for Tara. _I'm going to kill myself_. She didn't want to live in a world like this, in a world that sent 12-year-olds to their deaths for entertainment. _I'm going to slit my throat._

But when she reached into her pocket, her knife wasn't there.

She had forgotten it in Marvel's skull. It was gone. She couldn't even slit her own throat. She thought about turning around and going back to the clearing to see if Marvel's spear was there. Or back to the stream to open her backpack and take out her rope so she could hang herself. But she didn't have the energy. So she curled into a ball on the forest floor, and she waited for Clay to find her.

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They set fire to the justice center in District 11. They attacked the Peacekeepers. They hung their mayor, a notorious Capitol loyalist, from the balcony of his mansion. Reinforcements had to be sent in from the Capitol and from District 2. It took them more than 12 hours to restore order.

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In the Capitol, no one would say it aloud in a group of people. But they started to murmur it to their family members as they sat next to them on their couches, to whisper it to their closest friends at their viewing parties.

Maybe this was just a touch over the line.

Maybe the games had become just a bit too cruel.

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In the District 7 mentoring room, Cato made desperate phone call after desperate phone call, trying to make more money for Hera, trying to replace the sum he'd had to spend on medicine and medical supplies for her cuts. Trying to find a way to get her another knife before Clay found her.

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It didn't matter that she'd spent the last hour in the fetal position, wishing for death to take her to see Rue and Thresh and her mother. She was, like any other human being, hardwired for survival. So the sound of Clay's footsteps jolted Hera out of her suicidal haze and into a state of all-out panic.

She rolled to face him and jumped to her feet. The look on his face was one of shock, and at first she couldn't figure out why. But then she realized that he had assumed the two cannons that had gone off earlier that morning were for her and Rue. He had been expecting to find Marvel.

But Marvel was dead. With a knife in his left eye. A knife like the one that Clay held in his right hand. _Fuck._ Hera wished more than anything that she'd had the sense to retrieve the knife before the hovercraft took Marvel's body. Or that, failing that, she'd had the sense to go back and look for the spear. But she hadn't done either of those things, and now she didn't stand a chance against Clay and his knife.

But she had underestimated just how cocky he was. Because he tossed the knife to the side, not ten feet from Hera, and he threw his head back and laughed sadistically. "Oh this is gonna be fun," he sneered. He laced his fingers together and turned his palms outward while he stretched his arms out in front of him, cracking his knuckles.

Hera lunged towards the knife, but he grabbed her by the back of her neck and hurled her onto her side. Automatically, she relaxed her body and curved upwards, angling herself to take the brunt of her fall on her hip and shoulder. She leapt back up to her feet almost as soon as she hit the ground.

He just stood there, laughing at her. "Go ahead," he challenged. "Go for it again." She knew better than to take the bait. She stayed where she was and gave into her fear, allowing it to work to her advantage. She cowered and shrank in on herself, and he laughed even harder and stalked menacingly toward her. He was so arrogant that his hands weren't even in a defensive position; they were just down at his sides. His mouth was open and he was grinning, the tip of his tongue poking out between his teeth. His eyes were fixed on her face. If he'd been on his game, this would have meant nothing, but Cato had taught her to read Clay, and he'd already gone sloppy; she knew he was planning to hit her in the face.

Part of her couldn't believe that he was already giving her such a prime opportunity. It had to be too good to be true. But the other part of her yelled at her to take advantage of it.

She jerked her head to the right, dodging his punch, and let loose one tight, precise uppercut. It wasn't even that powerful, but it caught him completely off-guard. She connected with his jaw, just under his chin, and she heard the _click_ of his bottom teeth connecting with his top ones. His head snapped up and without a thought she sent a jab straight into his windpipe. The blow made him step backwards and Hera turned and lunged for the knife, panic rising from her stomach to her throat. She dropped to her knees and her hand found the hilt, and she twisted her torso and, as if on autopilot, sent the blade straight into his left eye just as he recovered enough to take a step in her direction. She briefly registered the sight of blood flowing from his mouth and the sound of raspy breathing before he crumpled to the ground and the cannon went off.

Twelve years of training undone by one moment of cocky carelessness.

She would later learn that his teeth had severed his tongue and that she had ruptured his trachea.

But all she knew at that moment was that the world was spinning around her and that the sounds of the forest had been replaced a by monotonous ringing in her ears.

She didn't hear the announcement of her Victory, echoing so loudly throughout the arena that it drowned out the chimes of the sponsor gift. She didn't see the little silver parachute waft to the ground in front of her mere seconds after Clay fell to the ground. So she didn't open it to find the knife that Cato had sent to her, literally one minute too late, purchased with money from the flood of donations that came pouring in from the women of the Capitol after she'd kissed Rue's forehead.


	10. Chapter 10

Trini and Gianni were jumping up and down and screaming ecstatically at the top of their lungs.

Johanna was laughing almost maniacally and pounding her fists on the table.

Cato stood stock still with his hands on his head, staring at the screen. _She's alive. She's alive. She's not going to die in there._

Gianni bounded over to him in excitement and grabbed his shoulders. "Haha, Cato, you son of a bitch!" he yelled as he shook him.

The physical contact knocked him back into reality, and he lost it. They had "conditioned" crying out of him at the Academy, but now Cato, who had not shed a tear in over a decade, collapsed to his hands and knees and sobbed violently until he had no more tears left to spill, and even then he continued to shudder and grind his face in the carpet and gasp for breath.

Eventually, he sighed and let his body go limp, and then he pushed himself up to a sitting position. Gianni and Trini had left him alone with Johanna.

"You're in love with her," she said matter-of-factly. "I figured it out when she killed Glimmer."

He made no response.

"Does she know?"

"No," he said quietly, shaking his head. "No, she can't….she can't."

"Why not?" Johanna frowned. "Does she love you back?"

"No!" His voice was harsh now. "She can't know." He glared at Johanna. "Do you understand me? She _can't_ know."

She raised her hands in surrender. "Ok. I won't say another word. I'll go tell Gianni and Trini to keep their mouths shut about your little scene."

When she reached the doorway, she turned back to Cato. "She'll probably be in the recovery wing in less than an hour. I'll see you there."

It was over half an hour later when Cato finally stood and walked out of the room. But he didn't go to the recovery wing. He took the elevator to the District 7 apartment, and he packed his things. He emptied the closet. He emptied the dresser. He took his copy of The Jungle Book from the nightstand. And as he walked out the door he decided to leave behind all of the raw and unfamiliar and terrifying things she'd awakened in him. Rage. Jealousy. Sorrow. Fear. Joy. Trust. Love.

He walked out of the apartment and back into his pit of apathy.

xxxxxxxxxx

"If it isn't the man of the hour!" Brutus hooted as he opened the door. "We didn't think you'd be joining us until at least five or six. Figured you'd be down in recovery to check on your Victor."

Cato grinned. "Nah, why do that when I can spend my time with company more to my liking? I did my duty. Let Johanna deal with that shit now."

"Fair enough," said Brutus, handing him a glass of scotch.

xxxxxxxxxx

A bruised shoulder. A bruised hip. A shallow cut on her temple. One gash on her thigh and another on her side. That was it.

They put her under anyway, to help ease her out of her shock.

It was Johanna who sat in the chair next to her when she awoke a couple of hours later. Hera just lay there staring at the lights on the ceiling, not quite understanding where she was. She felt light, too light, and yet somehow heavy at the same time.

"I won," she said after a few minutes.

"Yes."

"I killed Clay."

"Yes."

"Rue's dead."

"...Yes."

She had always assumed that the urge to kill oneself was an intense feeling. That if it were a color it would be red like blood. That it would come upon a person like a gale, roaring and shrieking, tearing things apart.

But then again, before the games, she'd never wanted to kill herself.

This feeling was a quieter one. It was white and sterile. It strolled on into her and sat down, as if it intended to stay for a while. It spoke softly to her, took little nibbles out of her.

"Don't think like that," Johanna said.

Hera turned to look at her. "Think like what?"

"Like you wish you were dead. What hurts?"

"How do you-?"

"Because I felt it too, right after my games. What hurts?"

"What do you mean?"

"What part of your body hurts?"

Hera thought about it. "My shoulder. My hip…my thigh." But the pain seemed muffled.

"Concentrate on it. Try to draw it out."

She did and the soft voice that told her it would be much nicer to be dead quieted down a bit, and became background noise.

"I thought Cato would be here by now," Johanna said a few minutes later.

"Are they mad at him?"

"Who?"

"Brutus and them. All of the people from 2. For helping me."

"Dunno."

"Well, he won't come."

"What makes you say that?"

"I was never supposed to win. Clay was. I messed up his plans."

"I don't think that's the case."

"Sure it is. He told me so himself. That he wanted to keep his reputation as a mentor up, but 2 still had to win. He trained me to get as far as possible, but I was never supposed to kill Clay."

"Uhhh, no. Trust me. You weren't there in that mentoring room with him. I was. The whole time. He was freaking out."

Hera let out a quiet laugh, but there was no humor in it. "He had to act like that. President's orders. Had to keep up the show in front of you. In front of Trini."

"Then what about that last sponsor gift? The knife?"

"What knife?" So Johanna told her. But it made no difference to Hera. "Again, keeping up a show. Seems convenient that it arrived just a little too late. Not too difficult to arrange considering he could monitor Clay's proximity to me on live tv at all times."

Johanna could see that this was going nowhere. So she changed the subject.

"I saw the interviews with your people from 7. That Dean guy is hot as fuck." Hera laughed. "He said he was gonna ask you to marry him after the reaping."

"On national television? He said that on national television?"

"Yeah."

"Jesus." Hera rolled her eyes.

"What would you have said?"

"Yes."

"So you love him?"

"No."

Johanna was quiet for a minute.

"Do you love Cato?"

"No," Hera lied.

xxxxxxxxxx

That evening Hera and Gianni sat on the couch in the District 7 apartment, pretending to watch post-games commentary, though neither of them were actually paying attention. He had laid out three different sketches of dresses he had designed for her post-games interview. Hera picked them up and pretended to consider them, but she stared at the pages blindly, and then set them back on the coffee table.

"I know when you first got here you said nothing that shows your back," Gianni said, gesturing to a sketch of a backless sea-green gown. "But I just thought, after everything you've been through, everything you've done...those scars...they're a part of you...the awful thing that caused it has helped shape you into who you are. I think they're beautiful. I think you should show them off."

She didn't say anything, just stared at the tv screen.

"Hera, sweetie?"

"Yeah?" she asked colorlessly, turning to face him.

"About Cato…"

"What about him?" she asked, seeming genuinely confused as to why Gianni would have any reason to bring up the topic.

"Nothing," Gianni said. He was finding her lack of emotion disconcerting. "Which dress dear?"

She leaned over the coffee table and selected the backless gown. "This one," she said, handing it to Gianni and turning back to the tv.

xxxxxxxxxx

 _Yes, this is much better,_ Cato thought to himself, four scotches deep, as he laughed and joked with the other Victors from 2.

They not only accepted his mentorship of Hera, they admired it. They thought he'd done it for the sake of pride, to prove to Panem that not only was he one of their greatest Victors, but also a juggernaut when it came to mentoring. The only one ever to have his tribute win in his first go at it, and now this-taking a tiny girl from an outlying district and shaping her into a warrior in three months. He had still brought honor to his own district this year, even if his manner of doing so had been unorthodox.

Brutus said it was obvious that Clay hadn't deserved to win anyway. To be so easily undone by such a delicate little thing.

Their pride and admiration didn't make Cato happy. But he understood his place in this circle of people, understood how he fit into life in 2, even if it left him feeling empty and numb. At least he was familiar with it, knew that the worst that would come of it was that he'd hang himself one day.

 _Yes, much better._

 _xx_ xxxxxxxx

Hera had found it easy to feign indifference to Cato during the daytime. But her dreams betrayed her. They were dark and bloody that night. She relived Rue's death three times. _Too slow_ , the little girl mouthed at her as she bled out. _You were too slow_. Each time she woke screaming, crying out for Cato, but each time it was Johanna who rushed into her room, Johanna who brought her a glass of water and smoothed the hair off her face.

xxxxxxxxxx

The next day, Cato lay on the couch in the living room, his head pounding so hard from his hangover he swore he could hear it.

He didn't realize it was actually someone knocking until Brutus emerged from his bedroom. "Was anybody gonna get the fucking door?" he spat. Cato groaned and pulled a pillow over his head.

"It's for you," Brutus called. "It's Johanna."

"Tell her to go away," he said from under the pillow. "I'm too hungover to deal with her. Tell her I'll see her at the interview."

He felt something poke him in his ribs. "Get up you lazy ass," Brutus said. "It's noon."

"Fine," Cato snapped, and stalked to the doorway. Johanna was glaring at him. "What do you want?"

"I need to talk to you."

"What about?"

"Hera."

"What, like her interview tonight? You and Gianni and Trini can't help her prepare for that on her own?"

"No, we've got that covered, thank you."

"Then what could you possibly need from me?"

"Seriously? It's gonna be like this?" Johanna looked disgusted with him.

"Yep. Seriously," he said, and slammed the door in her face.

"Dick!" she called through the other side.

He sighed with exasperation and went to the fridge to get a bottle of water. When he turned around, Brutus was watching him.

"What does it feel like?" he asked Cato.

"Huh?" Cato was confused.

"What does it feel like?" He sounded genuinely curious, but Cato had no idea what he was asking about. _What does a hangover feel like? He's had those. What does it feel like to have your tribute win the games? He's had lots of tributes win the games._

"What does what feel like?"

"Being in love."

Cato's hands stilled on the cap of the water bottle. His eyes stilled on Brutus's face. His heart stilled in his chest. "I'm n-"

"You're not fooling anyone, son. Except maybe Alec. But he's an idiot."

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato arrived at the studio at just about the last possible moment in order to avoid seeing Hera.

"Where is she?" he asked a stage assistant as he walked through the door.

"In there," she said, pointing to a dressing room. "Getting a final touch-up. She goes live in five." The door was cracked open just a little, and he could hear Gianni's voice as he walked past.

"It will completely ruin the line of the dress. Total case of VPL!"

"You can't be serious. Surely a thong will work," Trini argued.

"The dress is silk, Trini, silk," Gianni said insistently. "It shows everything. Her ass will still look great, but it's where the sides of the thong meet her hips that will be the problem."

"Fine!" Trini huffed. "But darling, _please_ be careful when you cross your legs out there. We don't want all of Panem getting a crotch shot."

 _Had he just heard that right? Was she completely bare under her dress?_

But he didn't have time to ponder this thought for long, because as soon as he sat down on the couch in the room he'd been shown to to watch the first part of Hera's interview and wait for his cue to join her onstage, Johanna marched up to him "What?" he asked coldly, turning away from her to face the tv.

She didn't say anything at first, just let out a disgusted snort. He turned back to face her and she glared at him, arms crossed over her chest. "She cried out for you last night," she said. "Over and over again. For _you_. She wanted _you_ to come into her room in the middle of the night and comfort her. But you couldn't. Because you didn't know. Because you weren't there."

And she spun on her heel and stalked off, leaving Cato speechless.

He had no time to recover, because Caesar was calling out Hera's name, and the crowd was roaring, and Cato looked up at the screen to watch her walk across the stage.

They'd put her in a silk dress the color of her eyes. It flowed like liquid over her curves, over the hollow of her waist, over the flat plane of her stomach and over the sharp ridges of her hipbones. The skin of her shoulders and arms had been polished until it was glowing and smooth. A diamond cuff adorned her right wrist, a purple bruise her right shoulder. One leg peeked tauntingly out of a slit in the side of her skirt, exposing the cut on her inner thigh. As they had for every other public event, her prep team had piled her hair on top of her head to showcase her long graceful neck and high cheekbones, leaving a few silky wisps loose to frame her face. Cato didn't know much about makeup but they had smudged some kind of bronze shit onto her lids and made her lashes heavy and sooty, so that her gaze was sleepy and sensual. She looked, as Gianni had said before the Games, positively fuckable.

And then the camera angle shifted, and he could see that her dress was backless. Her scars, which were a shade lighter than the rest of her, feathered across her back and shoulder blades and rose up in delicate, narrow ridges. Cato had never seen anything so beautiful.

When she reached the center of the stage, Caesar took hold of her fingers, and lifted her hand to kiss her knuckles heartily. The diamonds on her wrist glittered wickedly.

"Gorgeous, just stunning," Caesar said as he dropped her hand and motioned for her to sit on the loveseat.

She didn't acknowledge the compliment, just took her seat, and crossed her legs, exposing both of her calves and one delicious thigh to the world. Cato remembered that she didn't have anything on under her gown, that the silk was the only thing separating her flesh from the upholstery. She had to have been the sexiest fucking thing he'd ever seen, but something about her seemed off, and he felt a chill creep up his spine.

"Hera, now you actually came away from your games in good shape compared to most other Victors, but you did still take a bit of a beating. Tell us, how are you feeling?

"A little sore, a little tired, but overall, I'm good, thank you."

"Tell us about those first five days."

"They were cold and they were boring." The audience laughed.

And so it went. Caesar asked her questions about her training, her strategy, what was going through her mind when she fought Glimmer and Clay. Hera gave all the appropriate answers, throwing in a witty comment every now and then.

There were really only three questions that made Cato hold his breath as he waited for her to answer.

The first was about her scars.

"Now, I couldn't help but notice the scars on your back. We know they didn't come from the arena...would you mind telling us how you got them?"

Cato panicked internally, but Hera seemed completely unfazed. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes like a cat. "Let's just say I had a rough childhood," she said wryly.

The second question was about the logger.

"This Dean Callahan. He's a handsome fellow. Tell us about him."

"What do you want to know?"

"Well, I think we're all wondering...is there a future for the two of you?"

Hera laughed lightly. "I feel like that's something I should discuss with him in private before I share it with the nation. Don't you think, Caesar?" It was a clever answer, and Hera's tone was a teasing one, but it was all wrong. Cato's Hera sounded impish and sweet when she teased people. This Hera was jaded and worldly.

The third question was about Rue.

"The little girl. The sponsors. Why did you do it?"

Hera looked down at her lap, quiet for a few seconds, and then looked back up at Caesar. "Tara, Dean's oldest, who I volunteered for...she's like a daughter to me. I know that I would have been devastated if I hadn't been able to take her place in the games. And when I first saw Rue, I thought, how would her mother feel? I know how I felt about Tara, I'd want someone to get her home to me. And so that's what I tried to do with Rue. I tried to get her home to her mother."

The audience let out a collective sigh seasoned liberally with sniffles.

But Cato was horrified. She sounded fittingly sad, but he knew her well, and something in her tone struck him as detached, removed. Where was his Hera? Where was her warmth?

When they called him out on stage, she rose and turned to face him, smiling and stretching out a hand for him to kiss as he approached her, like a queen demanding homage from a lord. And Cato, stupefied and awed by this new Hera, took it and bent his head to brush his lips across her knuckles. But as he lifted his eyes to hers, his blood froze in his veins and his heart stopped in his chest.

He had come to love those eyes. They had lapped playfully at his in waves of blue and green and silver when she was feeling mischievous, and they had shimmered gently as they caressed him when she was serene. But now they had turned flat and dull, absorbing and extinguishing all the light that entered them. Like two stagnant pools. They looked how had felt inside since his games. They looked how he had felt inside before she had brought light into his life.

But he righted himself and returned her smile. He clasped Caesar's hand firmly before taking a seat next to Hera. He answered all of the host's questions with his usual aplomb, his tone cool and smug. And then it was time for them to watch the highlights from the Games.

Anyone watching him would have thought nothing was amiss

But inside he had a sick feeling that Hera wasn't there next to him. Instead, she stood behind him, watching herself watch herself while she lounged in a silk sea-colored gown on the loveseat across from Caesar, one leg draped languidly over the other, her hands resting on her bare thigh. The crowd adored her.


	11. Chapter 11

She sat on the roof and she focused on the feel of the cool night air on the bare skin of her arms and her back and her shoulders. On the sounds of the partygoers twelve stories below. On the dull ache in her shoulder and her hip. On the sharper pain in her thigh, and on her ribs.

Johanna was right. Concentrating on the pain in her body was better than letting the suicidal parasite hollow out her insides.

But the pain in her heart was another matter entirely. And so during the interview, when they'd forced her to talk about Rue, forced her to look at Cato, to sit next to him, she had put herself on autopilot and surrendered to the parasite.

But now, here on the roof of the training center, there was no one to remind her of the guilt she felt over Rue's death, no one to remind her that Cato didn't love her. It was blissfully peaceful.

Until she heard the elevator doors open.

Hera sighed to herself mentally, hoping whoever it was would just turn around and go back downstairs when they saw her. But she knew those footsteps. They were _his_. And they didn't retreat when he reached a point where she knew he must have seen her. They simply ceased.

She couldn't focus on the pain in her body when he was near. She didn't want to let the parasite feed on her. And she refused to let the pain in her heart take over. So she did the only logical thing she could think of. She stood up and turned around, intending to go back down to the apartment.

He sat on the concrete ledge of one of the raised flower beds, his head bowed. He didn't look up at her as she walked past him and towards the elevator.

"I saw the interviews they did in 7," he said to her back.

She stopped, but she didn't turn around. "Did you?" she asked, her voice flat and dispassionate.

"Yeah. I did."

Silence. _Yeah? So? What's your point?_

"Are you gonna marry that guy?"

 _The fuck does he care?_ "No."

"You were gonna marry him before the reaping though, right?"

"I'm not the same person I was before the reaping."

"Do you love him?" The catch in his voice reminded her of the day he'd said _Almost_ when she'd told him she was almost as tall as him, just before her pre-games interview, and she couldn't block the stab of pain in time before it hit her heart.

"What do you care?" she snapped, turning around to face him. But he was looking at her now, and something in his eyes tore at her heart again and compelled her to answer. "No. I don't." He released a breath he'd been holding and looked down at his hands.

"So what are you gonna do now?" he asked, looking back up.

She shrugged and looked away from him. "I don't know. Spend time with Johanna, meet with Gianni about my clothes for the tour. What about you?"

"Go back to training candidates at the Academy for a couple months. Get ready for the tour."

She brought her eyes to his face again. "Why? You're not going on it."

He raised his eyebrows. "I'm not?"

"Johanna said she'd go in your place."

He shrugged. "It's my victory too. It counts as a win on my record."

"Great," she said dryly. "That won't be awkward or anything. You. Stuck on a train with me. Wishing I was dead and Clay was alive."

He narrowed his eyes. "What makes you think that's how I feel?"

Was he fucking kidding? What _didn't_ make her think that was how he felt? She shrugged again. "You told me that's what you wanted from the beginning," she said, trying to sound indifferent.

"Hera," he said softly, and she felt another sharp stab of pain in her heart.

"You didn't even bother to come see me in recovery," she said, her voice tinged with pain.

"Hera," he whispered. _The sound of my name in your mouth._

"You've avoided me this whole time since I've been back." Her throat was starting to ache.

"Her-"

"And I saw you right before my interview. With Clay. I saw how the two of you looked at me. I heard how you laughed," She choked back a sob.

"Hera, I was _acting_ ," he said, and it sounded like a plea.

"Were you?" She was angry with herself for her vulnerability, and she wanted to take it out on him. "Cuz it didn't look like it to me. Looked pretty genuine. Maybe I'm the one you were acting with. Maybe you really are just a fucking monster."

"Then why am I here right now?" he demanded, his voice fierce.

"I don't know," she spat. "Why _are_ you here?" And she turned her back on him but before she could take a step he spoke again.

"I don't give a shit about Clay. I'm glad you killed him. The only thing that mattered to me was that you made it out alive. Fuck Clay. _Fuck. Him_. Yeah, you're right. That was my plan at first. To have him win. But then you...you..." he broke off. "I didn't even realize what was happening until I was too far gone. I knew it by the time you asked me if I'd be able to kill you and I lied to you when I said yes."

Hera turned back around to face him, her eyes wide.

"You wanna know why I've been avoiding you? Because I'm fucking in love with you. And I don't know how to deal with that. And I didn't really have to before the games. I mean I knew it, but I didn't have to face it because I was focused on trying to keep you alive and that was more important. But then when you won…and then I thought you and that guy from the interview…and I didn't know what to do and I didn't want to deal with it. Cuz I don't know how to do anything but be a tribute and a victor and a mentor. I don't know how to deal with what you do to me. And I knew that if I didn't avoid you I wouldn't make it one day before I lost control."

Hera's heart was pounding so hard she was sure he could hear it. "What would happen if you lost control?" she whispered.

"What would happen?" He let out a dry little laugh, a mirthless laugh, the laugh of a man not yet insane but teetering on the edge. "You sure you wanna know?" Hera said nothing, just stared at him. "Ok then," he said, and he let out another little laugh. He leaned forward, his eyes boring into hers. "I would _bury my face_ between your thighs until you were wet and limp and shaking."

The slick rush of warmth between Hera's legs told her he'd already accomplished the first effect he wanted to have on her, and she could feel her limbs beginning to comply with the second and third ones. She stood there unmoving, eyes locked on his.

"Fuck," he swore, and dropped his forehead to his palms, his elbows to his thighs.

Hera stared at the top of his head, wondering if she was delusional, if she'd just imagined his words. But her self-doubt lasted only a few seconds. And then she crossed the distance between them and tugged gently on his wrists to place his hands on her waist. His head snapped up and his eyes, exactly level with hers, were brimming with disbelief and hope, terror and reverence, all at the same time. He tightened his hands on her waist possessively and and then he leaned forward and fit his mouth to hers. Hera felt her heart drop to the cement and shatter to pieces.

They kissed gently at first, but they quickly grew more demanding of each other, and Hera took his bottom lip between her own, first to suck on it and then to give it a nip with her teeth. He shuddered and groaned, and opened his mouth wider to caress her tongue with his own, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her further in towards his body. Hera had no idea how long she stood there between his legs, but when she withdrew her lips from his, they felt plump and swollen. Cato pressed his forehead to hers as the two of them stopped to catch their breaths.

She cupped his face in her hands and drew back from him slightly. When he met her eyes, she grasped the back of his head and guided him toward her neck. He didn't put his lips to her right away, but stopped to nuzzle into her with his nose. She felt his eyelashes on her skin as he inhaled, and she tilted her head to allow him better access. He placed a soft, lingering kiss right where her neck and shoulder met one another, and then he opened his lips around the same spot, sucking on it gently while she held him there by his hair.

When he nipped her with his teeth, Hera felt liquid pool between her legs again. She whimpered and bucked her hips towards him. Cato let out a low growl and bit harder, then sucked on her skin aggressively. The ache at the apex of her thighs, which had been steadily increasing, became unbearable, and she tore herself away from him, backing up a step.

He looked startled and she saw concern cross his features, as though he wondered if he had pushed too far. But when he looked into her eyes the concern vanished, and she could tell that he understood what she wanted. He dropped to his knees before her, and grasping her hips, leaned his forehead into her stomach. She ran her fingers through his hair and he looked up at her, pleading for permission with his eyes. He looked so earnest that it made her heart ache even as it brought a smile to her face, and she gave him a small nod.

He exhaled shakily and then slowly, carefully, he bunched the fabric of her dress up, leaving the bottom half of her exposed. He stared at her for a moment in wonder. And then he leaned forward and did exactly what he had told her would do: he buried his face between her shock of it made Hera's knees go weak, but Cato caught her before she could fall. He laid her on her back and slid down her body to hook one of her legs over his shoulder before leaning into her again and put his mouth to the place she had rubbed in frustration when she thought about him at night before she entered the arena.

Hera couldn't think straight. He licked and he sucked, and he sucked and he licked and it was incredible but it was torture. She closed her eyes and arched her back. She ran her hands up her bare thighs, and she fisted them into his hair, lifting her hips to grind herself into his mouth, and she pleaded with him. "More," she begged. "More."

She felt him gently slip a finger inside of her and it felt good but it felt tight and and it hurt for a second, just a second, as she felt something inside of her tearing and she thought she heard herself cry out in pain, but then he pressed that finger into the front wall of her as he continued to suck and she didn't know what was happening but _oh_ _my god oh my god oh my god it feels so good_ she thought. She arched up even more and threw her head back until the top of it touched the ground. She put her palms to her forehead, her fingers digging into her own hair, the heels of her hands pressed to her eyelids. A tortuous, winding, tightening feeling took root deep inside of her and began to build upon itself exponentially and she was on the edge of a precipice, about to fall over, about to snap.

She couldn't take it anymore so she cried out his name.

And then something inside of her exploded and she felt herself clench - release - clench - release around his finger.

And then she went limp.

As she drifted down from her orgasm, Cato kissed the inside of each thigh with an open mouth three times, and then came to rest with his cheek against the hard bone just above her entrance. He stroked her thigh, and she lay there, trying to process what she had just gone through.

"What _was_ that?" she asked after a few minutes, even though she knew the answer.

She felt him smile against her as he realized that she had never had an orgasm before. "That," he said, kissing the bare skin of her pubic bone gently, "was you coming."

"Oh." She fell silent, but she was restless. For some reason, she still didn't feel sated. In a way he had given her a release, at least temporarily, from the tugging feeling, but in another sense he had only made the situation worse. Hera felt as though the pleasure he had given her somehow amplified the empty feeling, and she couldn't help but think that even as the muscles of her center continued to clench in aftershock, they were really grasping desperately to be stretched to their full capacity by him.

She reached down to his shoulder and pulled him up to her. He lifted her upper body gently, cradling her head with his hands, rubbing her temples with his thumbs, and bringing her back and shoulders to rest on his forearms, and he leaned down and kissed her on the mouth so tenderly that she thought she would melt. It was wonderful, and she felt so safe tucked under him, but it only made the emptiness more poignant, and the tugging feeling started back up.

So she gripped his biceps, wrapped her legs around his waist and ground into him. _Jesus Christ he was hard_. He let out a low cry and returned her thrust involuntarily, before freezing overtop of her.

"No, you don't have to do this," he whispered against her lips, although the look in his eyes told her that he wanted nothing more than to unzip his pants and sink into her.

"Cato, please," she whimpered. She tried to find the words to describe what she wanted. She slid her hands down the silk of her dress and ran them over herself where her thighs met her torso. "I feel...empty... hollow," she whispered.

He abruptly disentangled himself from her and sat back on his knees while he ran his hands through his hair. She almost cried at the loss of his weight and warmth against her, and she reached out her arms towards him. "Please," she begged.

"Hera, _stop_." he said through his teeth and he glared at her.

"Why?!" The question came out as a sob.

"Because I'm about two seconds away from ramming my dick into you and fucking you until you can't walk, and that's not how your first time should be," he said, and his voice was hoarse.

His words sounded so delicious they sent another rush of fluid down her thighs. She didn't care if he fucked her hard enough to scrape the skin off her back on the rough concrete. Anything had to be better than this empty feeling between her legs, anything.

"What if that's how I want it?" she asked, half sullen, half begging.

" _Oh my god Hera, please, please stop._ " he said. "You have no idea how long I've wanted you, how many times I've thought about you while I…" he swallowed hard. "I don't want to be too rough with you."

"You were rough with me all the time during training and I liked it," she whispered. "I used to lay in bed at night and think about how good it felt when you pinned me to the mat, and I touched myself while I thought about you."

"Fuck!" Cato yelled and jumped to his feet, bypassing the elevator and sprinting to the stairwell. He yanked the door open and slammed it behind him, and he abandoned Hera on the roof of the training center. She sat up, shaking, and for a few seconds she stared in shock at the doorway through which he had disappeared. Then she hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed until she'd wrung herself dry.


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N: I'm not thrilled with parts of this chapter, particularly the start of it. I don't know that it fits the tone of the rest of the story until about 2/3 in. If you have suggestions for how I can clean it up/revise it, please let me know in reviews/messages. I'm very open to constructive feedback. Thanks!**

Cato was starting to worry that he was going to give Hera abandonment issues.

As soon as he'd slammed the door to his room in the District 2 apartment he unbuckled his belt and shoved his hand down his pants. He could still taste her on his lips and in his mouth and the sound of her crying out his name as she came reverberated in his ears. He pictured her lying on her bed, her thighs parted, her fingers running over herself, and it only took about five strokes before he came with a sigh of relief.

It was that dead look in her eyes that had done him in and brought him out of his brief backslide. He could have dealt with it if Hera had showered her warmth down on another man and forgotten he'd ever existed. But he could not take the thought of her spirit drying up until it disintegrated into dust.

And what Johanna had said about her crying out for him in vain as she wrestled with her nightmares….it very nearly broke his heart.

So he had gone to the District 7 apartment as soon as he'd returned to the training center after her interview. "Up on the roof," Johanna said to him when she answered his knock at the door.

After he had given her her first orgasm, he had wanted to lift her into his arms, carry her to her bed, and worship her with his body, just like he had with his mouth, but he'd felt himself lose control when she ground herself into him. And the sound of her voice as she'd begged him….She had no idea the amount of self-control he'd had to exert not to rip off his pants and fuck her senseless. And when she'd told him that she had touched herself while she thought about him it had nearly driven him insane.

He still needed to cool down some more from their encounter, so he took an ice-cold shower. He was both elated and apprehensive as he sudsed up. He couldn't believe she'd allowed him- _wanted_ him-to touch her, to taste her. She had been so warm and wet and tight, the most delicious thing he'd ever seen, ever felt, ever tasted.

But he'd left her by herself on the roof after her first sexual experience, and he felt more than a little guilty about it. He wasn't quite sure what kind of reception he'd get from her after the stunt he'd just pulled, but he was determined to try to make it up to her.

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She didn't answer his tap on her bedroom door, and for a minute he wondered if she was still up on the roof. But when he cracked the door open he could see her dress, lying in a silken puddle on the marble floor. And when he pushed it open further and entered the room, there she was in her bed, facing the wall with her back to him. She must have needed to cool down as well, because her hair was wet and she was naked apart from the sheet covering the lower half of her body.

She didn't turn to greet him, but he knew she wasn't asleep.

He approached the edge of the bed and sat down. Still, she said nothing, didn't move a muscle. "Hera," he said softly, and then slowly, lovingly, he traced one of her scars with his fingers. He felt her stiffen, heard her inhale. He bent his head to kiss the same scar, and she exhaled and let her body relax. He guided her onto her stomach and straddled her legs, and then he touched his lips to each and every scar, lacing his fingers with hers when she clutched the sheet on either side of her head.

A small bruise was beginning to form on her neck where he had nipped her earlier, and when he was finished with her back, he returned to that spot and gave it a gentle bite. She moaned and pushed herself up off of the bed and into him, wriggling out from under the sheet, and he sat back on his heels and pulled her onto his lap so that her back was pressed against his chest and her legs were bent under her on either side of his knees. He wrapped his arms around her and attached his mouth to her neck again, shivering as he looked down and saw her breasts for the first time. They were beautiful, perfect, and he cupped them in his hands, caressing her nipples with his thumbs. She cried out and her head fell back against his shoulder.

He wanted to make her feel good again, to make up for leaving her on the roof, so he slid one of his hands between her thighs, and stroked her with his fingers, making her arch her back and moan. She was soaking wet and she clutched at his wrists, urging him on. He traced her opening with his index finger, and then slipped it inside of her.

"Cato," she breathed, grinding down into him. She lifted her hips and brought them back down. He'd thought his cock couldn't get any harder, but he was obviously wrong.

"Show me how you touch yourself when you think about me," he whispered, pressing a kiss to her ear and taking one of her hands in his to bring it down between her legs. He wrapped his arm around her waist and watched in fascination over her shoulder as she took the pads of her fingers and ran them over herself desperately, and he carefully slid a second finger inside of her.

After a couple of minutes, he sensed her starting to grow frustrated, and realized that she didn't know how to bring herself to release. "I can't…I need...I need..." She whimpered pitifully, unable to finish her thought, and burrowed her face into his neck.

"Shh, shh, it's ok, it's ok," he whispered to soothe her, and he kissed her forehead gently. He placed the fingers of his free hand over hers. "Like this," he whispered, showing her how to rub herself in a circular motion. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and gasped as he slid his fingers in and out of her, and together they stroked her until he felt her muscles spasm around his fingers and she cried out in relief and relaxed against him.

He was throbbing so hard it hurt.

She slipped off of his lap and turned to face him, taking his face in her hands and kissing him, then drawing back to tug at his t shirt. He pulled it off, and returned to her mouth, but she backed off again after one kiss.

She was looking at him shyly, running her hands over his shoulders, his chest, and his arms, and the look on her face was so innocent it made his heart twist. He smiled at her and sat back patiently while she explored, trailing her fingers down his sides and over the muscles of his stomach. She traced the indents where his hips met the waistband of his pants and he tried to keep himself from gasping, but a quiet one slipped out anyway. She hooked her index fingers into his waistband and gave a little tug and he hitched his breath. She looked up at him with eyes full of mischief, and he was so relieved to see his Hera back that he let out a small laugh.

He helped her remove his sweatpants and boxers, and watched her face as she looked at him in person for the first time. Her eyes widened a little and she swallowed, and he could sense doubt and fear setting in.

So he reached out and lifted her chin until their eyes met. "It's ok," he said softly. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to."

"Doesn't it ache?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Then…"

"I've gotten hard from thinking about you, or looking at you, or touching you for the last two months," he said, looking at her tenderly. "And it was ok. I took care of it. I can take care of this."

The mischief returned to her eyes. "Show me how you touch yourself when you think about me," she said and he burst out laughing at how cleverly she'd tossed his earlier request to her back at him. Then he took himself in his hand and started to stroke, his eyes still on her face. She reached out tentatively and touched the tip of him, and he shuddered. She ran her fingers around the ridge where his head met his shaft, and he groaned. Then she tugged on his wrist to still his movement. He let go and she wrapped her little hand around him. He thought he would faint. "Teach me," she said, and he covered her hand with his and guided her. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, and his breathing became unsteady. He felt himself winding tighter and tighter. _She's fucking touching me, she's fucking touching me,_ he thought, and he leaned his forehead into her shoulder, and tried and failed to stifle another groan. And then she stopped their hands and pulled away. _Why?! Why, why, why?_

When he opened his eyes she was lying on her back, knees bent, legs wide, her gaze locked solemnly on his face.

"Hera..." he said plaintively, shaking his head. "I'm not sure you're ready."

"Please," she pleaded. "I'm not afraid. I just want you to take away the empty feeling."

All his resolve left him with one rush of air as he exhaled. He bowed his head again.

"...unless you don't want to," she whispered.

He snapped his head up. "Oh no, trust me...I want to."

He slid closer to her and positioned his body between her legs. He placed a finger at her opening to make sure she was still wet. She moaned in answer, so he leaned down and took her into his arms as he had on the roof after he'd given her her first orgasm, cradling her head in his hands, supporting her back with his forearms. He kissed her on her forehead, on her eyelids, on her cheeks and on her mouth. And then he pressed himself into her, little by little, fighting back the urge to bury himself in her in one powerful thrust. _So tight, so tight, so fucking warm and tight._

She held her breath, and when he was a little more than halfway in, he felt her tense up. She let out a cry, but there was no trace of desire or pleasure in it. He immediately started to pull out but she wrapped her legs around his hips to stop him.

"Hera, no," he said firmly.

"I'm not punking out on this," she said stubbornly.

"No one accused you of that. If that's why you're doing this..."

"I'm doing it because I want to. I _want_ to. I love you."

It felt like what he'd thought winning his games would feel like. He stared at her in shock, and then he dropped his head onto her chest. He could hear her heartbeat.

"I fell in love with you the day I made your nose bleed," he whispered into her skin. "It took me weeks to understand what had happened, but that was the day. I know it." She sighed and he felt her relax around him a little. He eased in a little further.

"If they'd thrown us into the arena together I would have died for you. I would have run myself through with my own sword for you." A little more she relaxed. A little further he pushed.

"What you did for Rue...you took what I taught you, all the cruelty and all the violence, and you made it clean. You made me clean." A little further.

"The night I saw you holding that baby, I dreamed about our daughter. She had your eyes." She relaxed completely. He slid the rest of the way in.

"I'm ready," she whispered.

"You sure?" he whispered back, lifting his head to look her in her eyes.

In answer, she slid herself down the length of him and paused for just a second before driving herself up onto him again, burying him inside of her.

He almost came right then and there, but he forced himself to focus.

He braced himself with a hand on either side of her head and leaned down to kiss her, to put his tongue to hers. He rocked into her tenderly, reverently, selflessly. Her legs slipped from his hips to rest on the mattress. Her body language and the soft sounds that issued from her throat told him exactly what to do, how fast or slow to go, how to angle himself just right for her. He learned that when it was good she wrapped her arms around his waist, but when it was _really_ good she seemed to forget about him completely and tossed her head from side to side and dug her fingers into her scalp. When it looked like she was nearing orgasm, he shifted his weight to one hand, careful to keep his pace and angle, and brought his other hand down to stroke her with his fingers, making tight little circles over her flesh. She bucked her hips and cried out and then he felt her clench around him and it took all of his self-control not to come with her. He concentrated on maintaining his rhythm as she rode it out. She sighed contentedly and he slowed his pace.

When he looked into her eyes, he could tell that the empty feeling was gone. She was sated.

"I want to feel what it's like when you come," she whispered and he gave himself permission to let go. This wasn't like the hundreds of other times, though. He didn't detach himself. Instead, he immersed himself in the sensation of her, leaning his head down to take one of her breasts in his mouth. He felt her wrap a leg around his hip to open herself up further to him. She pressed one hand into the small of his back to urge him further down into her, and with the other she grasped his hair, holding him to her breast. He drove into her, fast and deep, over and over again. _God she felt like velvet. Warm slippery velvet suctioning the life out of him._

As he approached the edge, he wrapped his arms around her and held her as tightly as he could, and he put his forehead to the side of her neck. She responded by wrapping her arms around his shoulders and both legs around his waist. His thrusts became small and tight, more like pulses, and he dug his toes into the mattress, bracing himself to try to push into her as far as he could go, trying desperately to become bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. As he came, he cried out her name and pushed into her one last time to milk himself dry, and then he heard her gasp, felt a sharp pain in his shoulder as she bit him, felt her clench around him again as a final orgasm snuck up on her with no warning.

He rested all of his weight on her for a minute before rolling to his side, taking her with him. "Holy shit," she whispered and he smiled and kissed her tenderly. They lay quietly in each other's arms for a while, and he ran his fingers lazily over her back. "Your scars," he whispered. Her hair was still slightly damp, and it was a tangled, matted mess from their lovemaking."And your hair right now," he teased, smoothing it off her forehead.

She huffed playfully, pretending to be offended, and pushed his shoulder, but grew serious when her fingers came away wet with blood.

"I bit you!" she exclaimed softly, looking at the teeth marks. "I didn't even realize it. I'm sorry!"

He laughed at her. "It's ok. I liked it. You were just marking me as your territory."

"Oh," she said shyly, and put her mouth to the wound, gently sucking the blood from it to clean it. He shivered with pleasure.

"Are you sore?" he asked her when she put her head back on the pillow. He brushed another strand of hair from her face.

"A little," she said.

He disengaged himself from their embrace to look down between their bodies, and saw traces of dark red on the insides of her thighs. "Hera…" he breathed apologetically. She followed his gaze.

"It's ok," she said, smiling at him. "I liked it. You were just marking me as your territory." Cato felt his heart swell. He pushed gently on her hip to roll her onto her back, then slid down the bed to clean her thighs with his tongue.

When he was finished, he took her into his arms again and pressed his forehead to hers. "We be of one blood, thou and I," he whispered to her.

"You _have_ read a book," she teased.

"Yes. Only one though," he teased back.


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N: Ok, this is the last chapter of my first fanfic! It's also posted on AO3, under DustInTheWind. I have no plans to write a sequel to this, so if the mood strikes you...feel free. I** ** _am_** **considering writing another version of this story that's darker, with more of a slow burn/delayed romance and would veer off in a different direction than this one around chapter 4. In that one, Cato would be more sadistic. I haven't decided yet if I should go for it.**

 **I also** **have at least one "deleted scene" I'm planning to clean up and post as another chapter in the near future. I didn't use it because it would have changed the story significantly-it's an alternate ending to the evening that Hera and Cato open up to each other about their pasts on the roof, and they give in to the urge to turn things physical between them. So, basically it's smut. But tasteful smut.**

 **And here's a couple of random tidbits about Cato and Hera.**

 **When I imagine the scene where Hera sings to Rue, it's basically Lana Del Rey singing "Once Upon a Dream."**

 **I haven't decided where exactly District 7 is located. Somewhere in the northwestern quadrant of the U.S. is all the further I've gotten. Cato is from what we currently know as Nebraska.**

 **Thanks for reading!**

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She had just finished giving her Victory speech to the people of District 12. Her voice had been shaky and her eyes red but, somehow, she had managed to keep it together.

The second they returned to the train, she locked herself in her bedroom and let her sorrow wash over her.

When she emerged he was waiting for her with eyes full of concern.

He leaned forward as he sat on the couch, with his legs wide and his elbows on his knees, and Hera crawled into the cave his body made, where it was safe and warm, and curled up in a ball with her head tucked under his chin. He kissed her hair and drew his arms around her, sheltering her completely from the outside world.

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They were in District 11, and Rue was bleeding out. _Too slow_ she whispered. _You were too slow_. Hera woke screaming, but it was ok because he was there, with his arms around her waist and his tongue at the corner of her eye to catch her tears. "It's not your fault," he whispered, over and over again.

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They ate ice cream sundaes in 10. Cato gave her his cherry.

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Hera was sick in District 9. She swallowed back nausea instead of tears as she gave her speech. _I shouldn't have eaten all of that ice cream yesterday_ she thought to herself.

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She felt better in District 8, and his fantasy-the one involving the red shoes-became reality. "Fuck me," she moaned, her legs wrapped around his waist. "Please, Cato. Please fuck me."

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She taught him to play darts in District 7. He liked that the way she taught and the way he learned fit together neatly, like a key in a well-oiled lock. How they both liked to break a concept down to its most basic elements and focus exclusively on perfecting one thing at a time before moving on to the next.

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She was sick again in 6, but she hadn't had any ice cream. Cato fussed over her so much it actually annoyed her. "Maybe you should see a doctor," he said worriedly.

"I'm fine," she snapped. "Stop hovering."

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It poured all throughout their stop in 5.

"Naps on rainy days," she murmured, just before she fell asleep.

"Mmmm, I agree," he sighed, and snuggled deeper into her body.

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"Here," he said to her as they stood on the beach in District 4. He scooped up a handful of sand and transferred it to her cupped palms. She smiled as the fine grains slipped through her fingers.

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He dreamed of a twelve-year-old boy with green eyes in District 3. He woke shaking, but it was ok because she was there, running her fingers through his hair and singing lullabies to him in a low, sweet voice that made him think of honey.

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He woke her before sunrise in District 2. He wrapped her in his hoodie and they slipped off the train and out into the long grass. They watched as the red and orange rays set the edges of the clouds on fire and chased the purple and gray from the sky.

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Hera stood talking with a new mother in District 1. "Here," she said to Cato as he approached, and started to hand the baby she cradled against her shoulder to him.

"I don't want to break it," he said, recoiling and shaking his head vehemently.

"You won't," she insisted, laughing at him. "Just make sure you support her head. See what I was talking about? How soft their hair is at this age?"

He nodded, but he was nervous about dropping the baby girl. Until she sighed and fell asleep in his arms a couple of minutes later, and then he started to feel more confident.

And then he remembered his dream after the sponsor gala, and it hit him. Why Hera had been sick recently. He felt a stab of pride and tenderness so acute it was almost painful.

It felt like what he'd thought winning his games would feel like.

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They had returned to the Capitol for the close of the tour, and Hera sat on the cold tile floor of their bathroom in the training center, while Cato perched on the edge of the tub.

"What did you say it was again? She had my hair and your eyes? Or was it your hair and my eyes?" she asked him in between waves of nausea and sickness.

"My hair. Your eyes," he said, eyeing her sympathetically and wiping her forehead with a wet cloth.

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President Snow was not happy.

He had sold the games as a tradition that tied the people of Panem together in recompense for the great uprising 74 years ago, but they had been meant to aid in dividing and conquering, in keeping the Districts mistrustful of one another so they would be easier to control. And although she didn't realize it, one seemingly insignificant girl from 7 had reappropriated them, turning them into a means of promoting fraternity among the districts, through the connections she had formed with a tiny tribute from 11 and a brutal, bloody Victor from 2.

Fraternity was a dangerous thing. Fraternity led to unity.

The Peacekeepers had repressed the rebellion in 11, but only in the way that coals are banked in ashes for the night, still glowing and ready to flare up when properly stirred the next morning. President Snow could feel it in the way the people of 11 cheered for Hera on her Victory Tour, with adoration and enthusiasm, showering the stage with flowers in gratitude for her kindness to Rue.

The other districts followed suit, chanting her name before she appeared onstage, and cheering wildly when she made her entrance, pressing forward against one another in their eagerness to meet her.

Even the people of 2, curious about the girl who had captivated their most beloved Victor, treated her with quiet admiration and respect.

And, most frighteningly of all, the Capitol citizens all but worshipped her. They had grown bored with the traditional violent, meathead Victor, and found this new archetype-the maternal saint-fascinating and, somehow, glamorous. The Underdog, they called her. The Dark Horse.

She had never borne a child of her own flesh and blood, but Hera had become a symbol of selfless motherhood. The women of the Capitol pursed their lips over the topic of the Third Quarter Quell and murmured that, after all, children from the Districts, such as Tara and Rue, really weren't much different from their own sons and daughters, and they themselves really weren't much different from mothers outside of the Capitol.

And they were insatiable when it came to the topic of Hera and Cato.

The couple hadn't gone on the record with their relationship, and neither of them were fans of public displays of affection, but everyone could see that the newest Victor and her mentor were smitten with one another.

It was evident in the way she subconsciously looked for him when she felt unsure of herself (which was really anytime she was in the public spotlight), and visibly relaxed once she'd caught sight of him.

It was apparent in the way he laid his hand on the small of her back as he guided her through the crowds.

It was obvious in the way their eyes shone as they looked at each other.

It seemed clear to President Snow that this was Seneca Crane's fault...or at least the disgusting inter-District romance was; he couldn't be blamed for Hera's mothering of the little girl in the arena. But the mentoring switch up had been Seneca's idea, and for that he paid with his life, although the tv commentators presented it as an aneurysm, just as they had reported that the Mayor of 11 had passed away due to cardiac arrest.

This still left the President to wrestle with the problem of Hera and what to do with her. If he killed her off immediately as he had done Crane, he'd risk inciting a full-blown rebellion.

Plutarch Heavensbee presented him with the solution when they met to discuss the Third Quarter Quell. "It's quite simple, Sir. Our twist for the Quell will be to reap the tributes from the pool of living Victors. Of course, we don't have living tributes of both sexes from some of the districts, so we'll need to decide if we have fewer than 24 tributes, or if we place those remaining after the initial reaping into a pot for a second round to reach 12 women and 12 men. So it's not entirely clean. But it rids us of Miss Greenleaf, because if another tribute doesn't kill her, I'll engineer a natural disaster to do it for us."

"I like the idea," the President mused. "But if Johanna Mason is reaped instead? Or if she volunteers in place of Hera?"

Heavensbee had thought of this already. "Ah, yes, that's an easy one too. We'll need to ensure that Johanna's name is selected. And I'll have a little chat with Miss Greenleaf to... _persuade her_ to volunteer in Johanna's place."

"Oh, I like the way you think," President Snow grinned. "But what-or should I say who-exactly will you use to persuade her?"

Heavensbee shrugged. "The suggestion that harm may come to any one of the Callahan children, or perhaps even to Cato, if she doesn't comply with our request will do the trick."

The President laughed and clapped Heavensbee heartily on the back. "I'll sleep easy tonight for the first time in months thanks to you, my friend," he said.

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 _Yes, the old man has definitely lost touch_ , even with the people of the Capitol. Heavensbee smiled to himself as he prepared for another clandestine visit to Coin and District 13. The Third Quarter Quell, he knew, would never even take place. Hera's reaping would be the tool that stirred the embers of rebellion into a full-blown blaze.


End file.
